From an essay on the “Emotions.”

IT is impossible to form the faintest estimate of the good—the highest kind of good, which a single devout soul may accomplish in a lifetime by spreading the holy contagion of the love of God in widening circles around it. But just as far as the influence of such men is a cause for thankfulness, so great would be the calamity of a time, if such should ever arrive, when there should be a dearth of saints in the world, and the fire on the altar should die down. A glacial period of religion would kill many of the sweetest flowers in human nature; and woe to the land where (as it would seem is almost the case in France at this moment) the priceless tradition of prayer is being lost, or only maintained in fatal connection with outworn superstitions.

  To resume the subject of this paper. We have seen that the emotions, which are the chief springs of human conduct, may either be produced by their natural stimuli, or conveyed by contagion from other minds, but that they can neither be commanded nor taught. If we desire to convey good and noble emotions to our fellow-creatures, the only means whereby we can effect that end is by filling our own hearts with them till they overflow into the hearts of others. Here lies the great truth which the preachers of Altruism persistently overlook. It is better to be good than to do good. We can benefit our kind in no way so much as by being ourselves pure and upright and noble-minded. We can never teach religion to such purpose as we can live it.

  It was my privilege to know a woman who for more than twenty years was chained by a cruel malady to what Heine called a “mattress grave.” Little or nothing was it possible for her to do for any one in the way of ordinary service. Her many schemes of usefulness and beneficence were all stopped. Yet merely by attaining to the lofty heights of spiritual life and knowledge, that suffering woman helped and lifted up the hearts of all who came around her, and did more real good, and of the highest kind, than half the preachers and philanthropists in the land. Even now, when her beautiful soul has been released at last from its earthly cage, it still moves many who knew her to the love of God and duty to remember what she was; and to the faith in immortality to think what now she must be—within the golden gates.