"United
with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common
doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding
over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march
through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness
and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may
tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our
sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is
the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery
is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their
sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith
in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the
difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their
day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the
immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered,
where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark
of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage
glowed".
Bertrand Russel, A Free Man's Worship (1903)
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