PROGRESSIVE living is a condition of thought which is based on the understanding of divine law and on willingness to yield one's self to the guidance of that law. This condition is fundamental, because progress is both the law of God and the universal need of mankind. Ignorance of law may explain non-conformity with law, but it cannot avert its penalties. Ignorance is therefore always pitiable unless it. is wilful, but ignorance coupled with unwillingness to learn loses even its right to be pitied. A state of ignorance may conceivably be caused and possibly may be cured by wholly extraneous influences, but unwillingness to learn is a temperamental fault which can be corrected only through radical mental change. Speaking to Jews of this attitude of mind, Christ Jesus said, "Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life."
The procuring cause of unwillingness to learn is false desire, engendering a diseased consciousness which nestles down in the quicksands of its own base tendencies or the mire of its own conceit and refuses to be awakened until driven to it by the multiplied sorrows of its own making. The man who will not work because he does not like work, who will not think right because he prefers to think wrong, who will not resist evil because it seems so much easier to ignore it,—every such slave or victim of wrong desire can be evangelized only by getting rid of that desire, for habitual desire is probably the most formative influence in human existence. It is desire which shows kinship with that which is desired. Mortals think wickedly and desire wicked ends because their mentality is wicked. Men love and desire the beautiful, good, and true because their characters are beautiful and good and true. No man can fraternize with the thing which he abhors. No man can be boon companion with either good or evil and at the same time love and honor its opposite.
So it is with work and with progress. Progress cannot be made without work, and work is half-hearted and vain unless it be sincere, unless it be associated with earnest desire for fruitful activity as its motor power. When a great enterprise is on, a good worker cannot stand aloof priding himself on what lie could do if he would, or what he would do if lie had more to do with; he simply takes in hand the little or the much that he has or knows and puts it to use. There is no profit or contentment for him in any other procedure. The best work of any man is not done in the sweat-shop of necessity but in alluring devotion to high ideals. Great leaders of men are such because they love their work and cannot keep away from it; and they arouse like enthusiasm in others not by standing aside to theorize or to criticize, but by getting into the work and showing by force of example and well-directed energy how to secure results.
