Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/49

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struggle harder than we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of human life is open always.

And we can help to roughen our lives in the very sense in which Christ meant them to be roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing tendency of our day to multiply ways in which we are released from doing things for ourselves. There are none of us who do not have a hundred things done for us that our fathers and mothers had to do for themselves. Little by little, we are ridding ourselves of the responsibility of doing any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger living but it can go too far, and it would be a great thing if we resolved at periods that we would not let anybody else do for us what we could do for ourselves. There was a day, perhaps, when men needed the other rule, when it was a great deal better to get other people to do things for us than to do them ourselves, but the time has come when the world needs to reverse that principle. What the world wants is not organizers, but deorganizers, men and women who will increase the number of personal services and activities, and who will bring something frugal, simple and elementary back into life to