If we rise above him, to serve higher ideals, conscious of the sacrifice we make, and clear about the superior ends we gain thereby, then we may be forgiven. What some of those higher ideals are we shall have occasion to consider later. But to work ourselves into depression, disease, and pain, for no better reason than to get high mark in some rank-book or other, to gratify somebody's false vanity, to get together a little more gold than we can spend wisely or our children can inherit without enervation, to live in a bigger house than our neighbour has or we can afford to take care of--to work for such ends as these beyond the point where work is healthy and happy, is to commit a sin which neither Epicurus nor Nature will forgive. With the people who have risen above Epicurus, and are deliberately sacrificing to some extent the Epicurean to one of the higher ideals, as I have said, we have no quarrel; for them we have only hearty commendation. We do not ask the mother whose child is dangerously sick, the statesman in a political crisis, the artist when the conception of his great work comes over him, to heed for the time being the limits of strength and the conditions of completest health. All we ask of them is that later on, when the child has recovered, when the crisis is past, when the picture is painted, they shall reverently and humbly pay to Epicurus, or to Nature whom he represents, the penalty for their sin, by a corresponding period of complete rest and relaxation. We must bear strain at times; and Nature will forgive us if we do not take it too often. But we must not bunch our strains. We must not pass from one strain to another, and another, without periods of relaxation between. We must not let the attitude of strain become chronic, and develop into a moral tetanus, which keeps us forever on the rack of exertion from sheer restless inability to sit down and enjoy ourselves. What we take from excessive work Epicurus would bid us add to needed play. Play is an arrangement by which we get artificially, in highly concentrated form, the pleasure which in ordinary life is diffused over long periods, and attainable only in attenuated form. Play puts the great fundamental pleasures of the race at the disposal of the individual.