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humanity can only be met slowly.
It required several hundred years for the meaning and importance of St. Francis to become apparent.
To his contemporaries he seemed to be a disciple sent to the poor; yet his influence ultimately qualified the art and letters, and tinged the philosophy of life of several centuries.
All these new saints of ours.-new Christians, and loving persons who crowd the slums, and rediscover Christ in themselves and in others-lack power to explain; they merely exist.
Through them, or rather through the heart which they infuse, literature and intellect will return, art and mental vigor will be restored to us. It would seem that the bowels and viscera of society must be heated first, and thereafter in time — it may be a century or two--a warmer life will reach the mind.
These new grubs that creep out of the ground, these golden bees that dart by us in the sunshine, going so directly to their work like camp nurses, are more perfect creatures than we are, in that they deal with humanity as a unit.
You and I are nothing to them.
They have a relation to the whole.
They are living in a beam which we do not see, they are the servants of a great
Boston, the. Atlantic Monthly. Press, 1921.
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