A Sign of Moral Progress.––If we take ourselves more easily, however, we take other people more seriously. The sense of responsibility still rests upon us with a weight ‘heavy as frost’; we have only shifted it to the other shoulder. The more serious of us are quite worn with the sense of what we owe to those about us, near and far off. Men carry the weight more easily than women, because, for most of them, each day brings work that must be done, and they have less time than women to think anxiously about their relations with, and duties to, others. By the way, it is rather a note of the time that the translators of the Revised Version have given us ‘Be not anxious for your life;’ instead of the older rendering. But, if women feel the wear of responsibility for others more constantly, let but a burning question arise––the condition of East London, Home Rule, massacres in Armenia––and men feel it more intensely and passionately. This sharpened sense is not a malady of the age, but a sign of the times.
To those of us who believe we are all at school and have our lessons set as we are fit to take them in, this general sense of responsibility for others is an encouraging sign that we are being taught from above, and are, on the whole, getting on.