sorrow and pain. If we are to get the most and the best out of
life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things; and one of
the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of others'
points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that sympathy
we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness. If
we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition,
by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we
suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed,
wilful blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the
only one that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a
confidence in one's own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self-
estimation, which shut out, as by an opaque and sordid screen, the
light of heaven from the soul.






XII

PRIESTS





I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or
less intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean
necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics