80. We do not choose these reasons; they are rewards that have to be
earned. Those we have chosen are only slaves we have happened to buy;
and their life is but feeble; they hold themselves shyly aloof, ever
watching for a chance to escape. But the reasons we have deserved stand
faithfully by us; they are so many pensive Antigones, on whose help we
may ever rely. Nor can such reasons as these be forcibly lodged in the
soul; for indeed they must have dwelt there from earliest days, have
spent their childhood there, nourished on our every thought and action;
and tokens recalling a life of devotion and love must surround them on
every side. And as they throw deeper root--as the mists clear away from
our soul and reveal a still wider horizon, so does the horizon of
happiness widen also; for it is only in the space that our thoughts and
our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom. It
demands no material space, but finds ever too narrow the spiritual
fields we throw open; wherefore we must unceasingly endeavour to
enlarge its territory, until such time as, soaring up on high, it finds
sufficient aliment in the space which it does of itself fling open.
Then it is, and then only, that happiness truly illumines the most
eternal, most human part of man; and indeed all other forms of
happiness are merely unconscious fragments of this great happiness,
which, as it reflects and looks before it, is conscious of no limit
within itself or in all that surrounds it.
81. This space must dwindle daily in those who follow evil, seeing that
their thoughts and feelings must of necessity dwindle also. But the man
who has risen somewhat will soon forsake the ways of evil; for look
deep down enough and you shall ever find its origin in straitened
feeling and stunted thought. He does evil no longer, because his
thoughts are purer and higher; and now that he is incapable of evil,
his thoughts will become purer still. And thus do our thoughts and
actions, having won their way into the placid heaven where no barrier
restrains the soul, become as inseparable as the wings of a bird; and
what to the bird was only a law of equilibrium is here transformed into
a law of justice.
82. Who can tell whether the satisfaction derived from evil can ever
penetrate to the soul, unless there mingle with it a vague desire, a
promise, a distant hope, of goodness or of pity?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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