Problems, on which persons of keener intelligence and more aspiring soul
fret and foam their lives away as rushing water round a rock, do not
even break the placid surface of their days. Such men slip past them.
They look out upon the stars and read of the mystery of the universe
speeding on for ever through the limitless wastes of space, and are not
astonished. In their childhood they were taught that God made the sun
and the stars to give light on the earth; that is enough for them. And
so it is with everything. Poverty and suffering; war, pestilence, and
the inequalities of fate; madness, life and death, and the spiritual
wonders that hedge in our being, are things not to be inquired into but
accepted. So they accept them as they do their dinner or a tradesman's
circular.
In some cases this mental state has its root in deep and simple
religious convictions, and in some it springs from a preponderance
of healthful animal instincts over the higher but more troublesome
spiritual parts. The ox chewing the cud in the fresh meadow does not
muse upon the past and future, and the gull blown like a foam-flake out
against the sunset, does not know the splendour of the sky and sea.
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