for the welfare of mankind. No, my feeling was of quite another kind.
Nothing was farther removed from me than this sometimes quite childish
optimism. It was not enough for me to advertise the sufferings of a few
individuals and, when possible, alleviate them; I sought the causes of
them in brutality and injustice. Neither could I recognise the finger of
a Universal Ruler in a confusion of coincidences, conversations,
newspaper articles, and advice by prudent men, the outcome of all which
was the founding of a society for seamstresses or the erection of a
hospital to counteract the misery that the Controlling Power had Itself
occasioned. I was a child no longer, and in that sense never had been
childish. But my heart bled none the less with sympathy for society's
unfortunates. I did not as yet perceive the necessity of that
selfishness which is self-assertion, and I felt oppressed and tormented
by all that I, in my comparatively advantageous position as a non-
proletarian, enjoyed, while many others did not.

Then another mood, with other promptings, asserted itself. I felt an
impulse to step forward as a preacher to the world around me, to the
thoughtless and the hardhearted. Under the influence of strong emotion I
wrote an edifying discourse, _The Profitable Fear_. I began to
regard it as my duty, so soon as I was fitted for it, to go out into the
town and preach at every street-corner, regardless of whether a lay
preacher, like myself, should encounter indifference or harvest scorn.

This course attracted me because it presented itself to me under the
guise of the most difficult thing, and, with the perversity of youth, I
thought difficulty the only criterion of duty. I only needed to hit upon
something that seemed to me to be the right thing and then say to
myself: "You dare not do it!" for all the youthful strength and daring
that was in me, all my deeper feelings of honour and of pride, all my