The life of
the soul is a personal adventure, a quest for the way and the truth and
the life. It may be we shall find the ancient ways to be the true ways,
but if we are led to the truth blindfolded and without personal effort,
we are like those whom the Scripture condemns for entering into
Paradise, not by the straight gate, but over the wall, like thieves and
robbers. If we seek it for ourselves and come to it, we shall be true
initiates and masters in the guild.
No people seem to have greater natural intelligence than the Irish. No
people have been so unfortunately cursed with organizations which led
them to abnegate personal thought, and Ireland is an intellectual desert
where people read nothing and think nothing; where not fifty in a
hundred thousand could discern the quality of thought in the Politics of
Aristotle or the Republic of Plato as being in any way deeper than a
leading article in one of their daily papers. And we, whose external
life is so mean, whose ignorance of literature is so great, are yet
flattered by the suggestion that we have treasures of spiritual and
intellectual life which should not be debased by external influences,
and so it comes about that good literature is a thing unpurchasable
except in some half-dozen of the larger towns.
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