If we have any sense of gratitude to the people that have cared for us, we want to pass on affection. We know the affection that was our physical creation in the beginning and our upbringing through childhood and youth, yet most of us have never tried through most of our lives to pay back these debts to our parents. Indeed we usually do not become aware of those debts until it is too late. To know that would bring us to almost insupportable remorse after our parents have left us, if we were not aware that we could pay over to somebody else the affection and care which they once lavished on us. As we know that the physical energies of water and oxygen and carbon, of the food, the lime salts, and whatever else goes to make up our physical being, all come out of one source, so we are aware that all spiritual gifts come out of one and the same source. To be vividly aware of that, to stop and face the facts, to stop and take a view of where we are, tells us what next to do. It makes us eager to pay back some of that gratitude directly in prayer, and also indirectly through all the way stations by which this help has come to us. If you want to please a mother you do something for her children. A human being lives in his children, in the people or the undertakings that are his children literally or figuratively. If you love him, you feed his lambs. So we get the impulse to pass on the best fruits of life, first to the one source of all that makes us grateful, and then to the children of this central Energy, the different way stations from which it has come to us. We eat our heads off like stabled horses with too much oats, if we do not get a chance to give away some of what has come to us. A man who tells funny stories is always grateful to the man who will listen to him. The same principle holds true all the way from story-telling to social work. It can be taken as humiliating, but properly viewed it is a sanifying and humbling fact. I wrote a moment ago of the sense of what we owe to our parents, a debt that seems almost insupportable sometimes. It would be insupportable if we could not pay it on to somebody else. Were it not for this central fact our gratitude would be a curse not a blessing. But in fact those who gave to us, our parents and all the rest, are best pleased if we pay over their gifts to somebody else. That is how we can best repay them. If this is a right conception of the source out of which comes the energy that has set us going and will keep us going, I think we can trace out a justification for the principles of social work which I have tried to present in this book and will now summarize: