Happily, even in those whose vision is most limited, there is always something that acts in silence as though they had seen. It is possible, perhaps, that to be good is only to be in a little light what all are in darkness. Therefore, doubtless, is it well that we should endeavour to raise our life, and should strive towards summits where ill-doing becomes impossible. And therefore, too, is it well to accustom the eye to behold events and men in a divine atmosphere. But even that is not indispensable; and how small must the difference seem to the eyes of a God! We are in a world where truth reigns at the bottom of things, and where it is not truth but falsehood that needs to be explained. If the happiness of your brother sadden you, do not despise yourself; you will not have to travel far along the road before you will come across something in yourself that will not be saddened. And even though you do not travel the road, it matters little: something there was that was not sad....
Those who think of nothing have the same truth as those who think of God; the truth is a little further from the threshold, that is all. ‘Even in the life that is most ordinary,’ says Renan, ‘the part that is done for God is enormous. The lowest of men would rather be just than unjust: we all worship, we all pray, numbers of times every day, without knowing it.’ And we are surprised when chance suddenly reveals to us the importance of this divine part. There are about us thousands and thousands of poor creatures who have nothing of beauty in their lives: they come, they go, in obscurity, and we believe that all is dead within them; and no one pays any heed. And then one day a simple word, an unexpected silence, a little tear that springs from the source of beauty itself, tell us that they have found the means of raising aloft, in the shadow of their soul, an ideal a thousand times more beautiful than the most beautiful things their ears have ever heard, or their eyes ever seen. Oh, noble and pallid ideals of silence and shadow! It is you, above all, who call forth the smile of the angels, it is you, above all, who soar direct to God! In what myriads of hovels, in what dens of misery, in what prisons, perhaps, are you not being cherished at this moment, cherished with the purest blood and tears of an unhappy soul that has never smiled; even as the bees, at the time when all the flowers are dead about them, still offer to her who is to be their queen a honey a thousand times more precious than the honey they give to their little sisters of daily life.... Which of us has not met, more than once, along the paths of life, a forsaken soul that has yet not lost the courage to cherish, in the darkness, a thought diviner and purer than all those that so many others had the power to choose in the light? Here, too, it is simplicity that is God’s favourite slave; and it is enough, perhaps, that a few sages should know what has to be done, for the rest of us to act as though we knew too....