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Self-salvation, self-elevation, the ideas that give birth to, and destroy half of our Christianity, half of our philanthropy!

Let him who has risen to material success altogether by methods approved by the idealists, let him who has fallen from on high with graceful majesty, without hysterical clutchings and desperate attempts at self-salvation in disregard of the safety of others let either of these superhuman beings come forward with the first stone for Norman.

A great wall separates the masses from those imperative truths that must be known and flung wide if civilization is to be saved. As currently constituted, Church, Press, Education seem to-day organized to exploit the ignorance and the prejudices of the masses, rather than to light their way to self-salvation.

Self-preoccupation is as fatal to the latter as to the former. Personal piety is travestied by being thought to be a respectable prudence here for the sake of a reward hereafter. It is not a careful self-salvation at all. Rather it is a salvation from self. It is the being lost to self in devotion and service to God and one's fellow-men.

We cannot now stop to see how pessimism, the doctrine of self-salvation, and the nature of that salvation through contemplation and asceticism and withdrawal from active life, all inevitably follow from such a course of thought. That which here needs emphasis is that all this thinking renders it still more impossible to think of the self as having any intrinsic worth.

In a pang of despair, windows and organ collapsed like cardboard; incense and arches vanished, and then rose again with the light of a more gracious vision upon them. For if the dignity and desire of mere self-salvation had departed, all the lighter colours and livelier joys of the conversion of others filled the sky of faith with morning tones and harmonies.

Self-salvation, self-elevation, the ideas that give birth to, and destroy half of our Christianity, half of our philanthropy!

I merely want to inform you that things are coming to such a pass that I may be forced to drop out of this game purely as a move of self-salvation. For instance, it appears very unwise to make any further attempts to frighten that bunch of girls. They simply don't scare. See that?"

As he lay, thinking furiously on every possibility of self-salvation, there came to his sensitive nostrils a faint and a familiar scent. Instantly every faculty of his mind was upon the alert. Presently his trained ears caught the sound of the soundless presence without behind the hut wherein he lay.