"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine, lest haply they trample them under their feet, and turn and rend you."
Since Love is "the greatest thing in the world," we are bound to stand ready with girt loins, and trimmed, burning lamps, to shed its light far and wide. To cover it up would be to deprive ourselves and our fellows of the one sight in all the world best worth seeing, and so to hinder its spread. False modesty that would keep Love's good works out of sight is as bad as false pride that would thrust oneself forward. Though works done merely to be seen are not good at all, yet good works genuinely done for Love's sake gain added influence and lustre when frankly and freely allowed to be seen as the beautiful things that they are. The Christian is under spiritual compulsion to be a missionary. Other systems draw their little circles of disciples about them, as Jesus drew His twelve. One cannot hold what he believes to be a true and helpful view of life without wishing to communicate it to others. Yet this tendency, which is natural to every principle, is characteristic of Christianity in a unique degree. For the Christian Spirit consists in Love, the desire to give to others the best one has. And what can be so good, so desirable to impart, as this very Spirit of Love, which is Christianity itself? That is why the Christian must, in some form or other,--by journeying to foreign lands, by contribution to missionary work at home, by gifts to Christian education, by support of settlement work, or perhaps best of all by the silent diffusion of a Christian example in the neighbourhood, or the unnoticed expression of the Christian Spirit in the home,--be a propagator of the Spirit of Love he has himself received.
"Ye are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a lamp and put it under the bushel, but on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house. Even so let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."
Does virtue bring happiness? is a question every philosophy of life must meet. Yet before it can be rightly answered it must be rightly put.