Miss Wallard

Work Done for Humanity^*
(1890)

The most normal and the most perfect human being is the one who must thoroughly addresses himself to the activity of his best powers, gives himself most thoroughly to the world around him, flings himself out into the midst of humanity, and is so preoccupied by his own beneficent reaction on the world that he is practically unconscious of a separate existence. Introspection, and retrospection were good for the cloister; but the uplook, the outlook and the onlook are alone 164 worthy the modern Christian. To change the figure, an normal Christian stands in the midst of a great, beautiful and varied landscape. It is the landscape of beneficent work. Above him reaches the boundless skies, brilliant with the stars of God and Heaven.

Love and friendship for a beautiful rainbow over his landscape and reach up toward his sky. But the only two great environments of the soul are work for humanity and faith in God. Those wounded in love will find that affection, dear and vital as it is, comes to us not as the whole of life, not as its wide wondrous landscape of the earth, not as its beautiful vision of the sky, but as its beautiful embellishment, its rainbow fair and sweet. But were it gone there would still remain the two greatest and most satisfying pictures on which the soul can gaze—humanity and God. 165

^*From an address before the Seventeenth Convention of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1890. it was on entering that cave of gloom, and ever the right comes uppermost; and now is Christ’s kingdom nearer than when we first believed.