To this effect we find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing, approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if you knew you were to die tonight?"
The priest expected the man, who was a bit irregular in his churchgoing, to say, "I would spend my last hours in confession and prayer." But the peasant replied, "How would I spend the rest of the day if I were to die tonight?--why, I'd plow!"
Hence, Wallace holds that it is better to plow than to pray, and that in fact, when rightly understood, good plowing is prayer.
All useful effort is sacred, and nothing else is or ever can be. Wallace believes that the only fit preparation for the future lies in improving the present. Please pass the dotage!
In a sinless and painless world the moral element would be lacking; the goodness would have no more significance in our conscious life than that load of atmosphere which we are always carrying about with us.
We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential soundness of which can not be gainsaid. In a happy world there must be pain and sorrow, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is indispensable. The stern necessity for this has been proved to inhere in the innermost constitution of the human soul. It is part and parcel of the universe.
We do not find that evil has been interpolated into the universe from without; we find that, on the contrary, it is an indispensable part of the dramatic whole. God is the creator of evil, and from the eternal scheme of things diabolism is forever excluded.
From our present standpoint we may fairly ask, what would have been the worth of that primitive innocence portrayed in the myth of the Garden of Eden, had it ever been realized in the life of men? What would have been the moral value or significance of a race of human beings ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more consciousness or volition than the deftly contrived machine that picks up raw material at one end, and turns out some finished product at the other? Clearly, for strong and resolute men and women, an Eden would be but a fool's paradise.
Early in life John Fiske aimed high and thought himself capable of great things. He also believed that the world accepted a man at the estimate he placed upon himself.