"Don't tell the old boy," he said. "I keep these things here, and
wash on the floor."
That was the best thing I myself ever got out of egg-boxes--that
picture of a deceitful son stealthily washing himself upon the floor
behind the bed, trembling at every footstep lest it might be the
"old boy" coming to the door.
One wonders whether the Ten Commandments are so all-sufficient as we
good folk deem them--whether the eleventh is not worth the whole
pack of them: "that ye love one another" with just a common-place,
human, practical love. Could not the other ten be comfortably
stowed away into a corner of that! One is inclined, in one's
anarchic moments, to agree with Louis Stevenson, that to be amiable
and cheerful is a good religion for a work-a-day world. We are so
busy NOT killing, NOT stealing, NOT coveting our neighbour's wife,
we have not time to be even just to one another for the little while
we are together here. Need we be so cocksure that our present list
of virtues and vices is the only possibly correct and complete one?
Is the kind, unselfish man necessarily a villain because he does not
always succeed in suppressing his natural instincts? Is the
narrow-hearted, sour-souled man, incapable of a generous thought or
act, necessarily a saint because he has none? Have we not--we unco
guid--arrived at a wrong method of estimating our frailer brothers
and sisters? We judge them, as critics judge books, not by the good
that is in them, but by their faults.
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