8 THE WORKING FAITH OF 



student of nature who recognises one life in all the scale 

 of plants and animals, from the hyssop and the rue to the 

 forest trees, and from the protozoon to man, and yet 

 lovingly notes the things in which they differ. The 

 rational life that builds society we also know to be one ; but 

 so vast is the latent wealth of that one life that it requires 

 nothing less than the inexhaustible variety of human char- 

 acter, shaped under all kinds of natural conditions and 

 spiritual climates, in order to express itself. 



And, chiefly, the true social reformer realises the 

 supreme value of it all. To him there is nothing common 

 or unclean. He is quick to discern the touch of good 

 that lives in every man, and makes him live. His wisdom 

 is not that of the man-of-the-world, who interprets things 

 by their meanest aspects, and therefore w-interprets 

 them. By the insight of sympathy, he gets near the facts 

 of human character, to the confused and obscure struggle 

 for something believed to be good, which, after all, is the 

 ultimate reason of any human act. 



Aristotle demanded good character of the student of 

 ethics ; and following him, we may say that if a man's 

 equipment of sympathy is scanty, his study should not be 

 men in their mutual relations, nor that system of services 

 we call society, but something else. We canjunderstand 

 the^ needs and wrongs of men only if we feel them, and 

 we_canj"emedy _them only by atoning for them in our 

 ownjives,. The reformer who has not this working faith 

 in his fellow-men, who only blames them and attacks their 

 institutions, has not learnt the alphabet of his science. 

 Hard judgments of human character and human institu- 

 tions are generally false, and always shallow. The helper 

 of mankind recognises the good in that which he would 



