THE most common test of the quality of indifference is its effect on its object. If this effect be negligible, it is held that indifference may be blameless, at times may be desirable. Presumably one may be utterly indifferent, without fault or delinquency, to the person one passes on the street, to the incident across the way, or to countless trivial or even major occurrences of the day, provided that these occasions involve no direct moral appeal for active concern on the part of the observer.
The denial of moral obligation is an offense against conscience so obviously culpable as to be avoided. But human relations are so increasingly complex and the daily round of the individual is tangent to so small a segment of humanity as a whole, that the temptation constantly presents itself to the individual to enlarge even to the danger line the sphere of his unconcern, and more and more to confine his active interests to the orbit defined by a selfish view of his own welfare or that of his own clan, and to those responsibilities to the community which one is not allowed to evade.
Mrs. Eddy writes: "To love, and to be loved, one must do good to others. The inevitable condition whereby to become blessed, is to bless others" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 127). Indifference is really due to lack of love, a state of spiritual inactivity, the most serious result of which is its effect on its subject or agent, for no fact is more firmly grounded in human experience than that alertness and activity mean health and growth, and that sluggishness and inaction as surely result in decay and loss in whatever field of action these qualities are manifest.
