forces and influences were in younger hands. But the men themselves
never lost the sense of their importance. I knew an octogenarian
clergyman who declared once in my presence that it was ridiculous
to say that old men lost their faculty of dealing with affairs.

"Why," he said, "it is only quite in the last few years that I feel
I have really mastered my work. It takes me far less time than it
used to do; it is just promptly and methodically executed." The old
man obviously did not know that his impression that his work
consumed less time was only too correct, because it was, as a
matter of fact, almost wholly performed by his colleagues, and
nothing was referred to him except purely formal business.

It seems rather pitiful that we should not be able to face the
truth, and that we cannot be content with discerning the principle
of it all, which is that our work is given to us to do not for its
intrinsic value, but because it is good for us to do it.

The secret government of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated
by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw
that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things
which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance,
as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet
by letting one hold the blotting-paper and another the ink, so that
they believe that they are helping when they are merely being kept
from hindering.

And this strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and
energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn
out hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may