It is not difficult to understand why the factors of modern art and science have not fulfilled their calling, and cannot fulfil it. They do not fulfil it, because they have converted their duty into a right. The scientific and art activities, in their true sense, are fruitful only when they ignore their rights, and know only their duties. Mankind value this activity so highly, only because it is a self-denying one. If men are really called to serve others by _mental_ labour, they will have to suffer in performing this labour, because it is only by suffering that spiritual fruit is produced. Selfdenying and suffering are the lot and portion of a thinker and an artist, because their object is the welfare of men. Men are wretched: they suffer and go to ruin. One cannot wait and lose one's time. A thinker and an artist will never sit on the heights of Olympus, as we are apt to imagine: he must suffer in company with men in order to find salvation or consolation. He will suffer because he is constantly in anxiety and agitation; he might have found out and told what would give happiness to men, might have saved them from suffering; and he has neither found it out nor said it, and to-morrow it may be too late--he may die. And therefore suffering and self-sacrifice will always be the lot of the thinker and the artist. He who is brought up in an establishment where learned men and artists are created (but, in reality, they create only destroyers of art and science), and who obtains a diploma, and is well provided for, for life, will not become a thinker or an artist, but he who would gladly abstain from thinking, and from expressing that which is ingrafted in his soul, but which he dare not overlook, being drawn to it by two irresistible powers,--his own inward impulse and the wants of men. Thinkers and artists cannot be sleek, fat men, enjoying themselves in self-conceit. Spiritual and mental activity and their expressions are really necessary for others, and are the most difficult of men's callings,--a cross, as it is called in the gospel. The only one certain characteristic of the presence of a calling is this self-denying,--the sacrifice of one's self in order to manifest the power ingrafted in man for the benefit of others. To teach how many insects there are in the world, and to observe the spots on the sun, to write novels and operas, can be done without suffering; but to teach men their welfare, which entirely consists in self denial and in serving others, and to express this teaching powerfully, cannot be done without self-denial. The Church existed in her purity as long as her teachers endured patiently and suffered; but as soon as they became fat and sleek, their teaching activity ended. "Formerly," say the people, "priests were of gold, and chalices of wood; now chalices are of gold, and priests of wood." It was not in vain that Jesus Christ died on a cross: it is not in vain that sacrifice and suffering conquer every thing.