I said again the quotation from St. Augustine: “‘Love God, and do as you please,’ for if you love the good, wholly, you can do only the good.
“Remember,” I said, “that if the contagiously sick are not cared for, we shall all be ill; and, just so, starvation, poverty, sin, hurt each one of us, wherever they be, and must be cured for our own sake. Let us get over the self-righteous, sentimentally virtuous feeling which I fear charity has given many people. For that reason I have always disliked the word ‘charity.’”
“But the virtuous feeling is very pleasant,” Virginia said.
“Hardly,” I answered, “so sane and sound as the pleasant feeling of helping ourselves, all together.”
“The word ‘charity,’” said Marian, “comes from a Greek word meaning gratitude, the word ‘charis.’”
“I had always thought of it,” I said, “as coming from the Latin ‘carus,’ meaning love. But that is interesting. For gratitude is always a debt paid. And so, I fear, all our charity is a debt partly and never wholly paid. The most that a man can give, being able to give, still leaves him more than his share. And that is why I seldom have the joy untainted, of which Virginia speaks.”
Virginia said it made her glad to see people happy because of her. She said: “Once three of us gave a little boy a ten-cent plaything, and it made him so happy we felt as though we had done something fine.”
Ruth agreed with me that it was impossible to overcome a feeling of personal guilt at the sight of misery.
“You see,” I went on, “that for the rich poverty is as bad as for the poor. Drunkenness and misery ask their price of the rich man.”
“Yes,” said Virginia, “for to see poor and drunken people bothers the rich man.”
“She is quite right,” I said; “poverty does and must bother the rich man, and that is just why he must get rid of it. Wells, the socialist, once said he dared not let any man be sick or poor or miserable, and bring up sick, poor, miserable children, for he could not tell what man’s grandchild would one day marry his grandchild.”
“That is an interesting way of looking at it,” said Marian. “I never thought of that.”
“So you see,” I went on, “we can no more praise ourselves for helping to better the world than we can praise people—except for their good sense and wisdom—when they put up hospitals for contagious diseases, and separate those who suffer from them. Did you ever think of it, that to take care of the weak strengthens the strong? The man who cares for two gets the strength of two.”