The possessive outlook, in its very inception, sets a limit to the springs of spiritual growth or action, and to that “perfect freedom” the basis of which is service. But if “service is perfect freedom,” then “domination is perfect bondage,” as much for those who impose as for those who suffer it. For the man who domineers over his fellows receives in his own soul the reflex or complementary part of that evil effect which he has on others. There is no act done by man to man which is not sacramental in its operation for good or ill; in all his deeds to his neighbours he both gives and receives, either for his own help or hindrance. Whosoever gives a blow receives one; and that blow may be the heavier that is not returned in kind. He who does unkindness to others is unkind to his own soul; he who diminishes the self-possession of others diminishes his own. Yet possession--in the sense of realising each one for himself the wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer--is so deep an instinct, is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which the higher human consciousness is built--that it is useless to turn on man and say to him: “Possess nothing--rid yourself of all joys, of all the delights of the senses and the understanding--so only shall you attain to the heavenly stature.” That doctrine has been preached in the past; and the squeals of Manichean hermits in the wilderness, and of monastic contortionists, denying to their senses the very ground upon which they stood, has been its echoing chorus all down the ages. Never were souls more horribly possessed than these fliers from possession; never were men more defeated in their warfare with the thing they spurned. Like a tin tied to a dog’s tail the more they ran from it, the more the flesh afflicted them reminding them of its neglected claims. The loveliest and wisest of these mediæval sinners against the life which God had given them was brought by his own gospel of peace to a death-bed repentance which others did not attain to. “Brother ass, I have been too hard upon thee,” said St. Francis, turning with compunction at last to his much-wronged body, the one thing to which, in mistaken piety, he had denied either consideration or love. The single greed which ate up and destroyed the life of that lovely saint was a greed for mortification; and he died very literally of blood-poisoning, brought about by his own suicidal act, because he willed too possessively to share the passion and sufferings of Christ--the death instead of the life. That blood-poisoning of the mediæval saint’s was a reaction, violent and unkind, against the wrongful version of possession which, in their day as in our own, was destroying the peaceful possibilities of human society. Yet without a certain quality of possessiveness the human mind cannot grow. Wordsworth pictures for us very beautifully that natural possessive element in its age of innocence.