... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found work to do--work that people could not understand. The people invariably thought there must be a trick about the giving--that the eager one wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.
First of all, they were honest--that was the hill-rock. Such men come to make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves. They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand that they had something good to give--those closest to them, not always seeing it first....
You couldn't buy them--that was first established; then they turned the energies of their lives outward instead of in. The _something_ immortal about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found their particular _something_ to do. They found their work--the one thing that tested their own inimitable powers--and that, of course, proved the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The world-man wants to give something to his people--the best he has from his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction--the most important in any life--to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely new--the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.
Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally realises _its own religion_. The greatest wrong that has been done us by past generations is the detachment of work and religion--setting off the Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days for the progress of the animal.