"Even These Least"

V. "Even These Least "

I do not ask who you are—that is not important to meYou can do nothing, and be nothing, but what I will enfold you.

Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons - brother of slaves, felons, idiots, and of insane and diseased persons.

Whitman has been the most misunderstood man in literature. With Puritanic self-confidence, respectable society decided instanter that it would have none of him. What mercy could one expect who would calmly announce himself as not only the poet of goodness, but the poet of wickedness as well?

He affirms of himself all sorts of crime, vice, and contemptible traits, but it is with the same unrelenting readiness with which he asserts his equality with potentates and seers, with saints and gods; and the one attitude no more indicates vaunting depravity than the other reveals absurd egotism.

He is contending for race unity, for the "vast similitude" that interlocks all, and does not flinch when he finds wrong and folly and misery a part of the great whole.

He accepts the earth as he finds it and is bound to see that it is good.

My gait is no fault-finder's or rejector's gait;
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

He will not accept anything which all may not possess, even self-imputed virtue. He feels that through him all the "long dumb voices" may find expression. Slaves, prostitutes, deformed persons, the diseased and despairing, thieves and dwarfs, all find in him the sympathetic interpreter.

In all the "new thought" atmosphere, nothing is really newer than the attitude it is helping to secure toward wrong doing. True, it is no newer than the Judean teachings of one who is supposed to be the teacher of Christendom, but it is new nevertheless.

Walt Whitman startles by the unfaltering utterance which he gave two score years ago to a charity, which we are with hesitancy feebly trying for to-day.

Phariseeism has been a cultivated virtue so long that it takes away one's breath to find a man who thanks the Lord so fervently that he is as other men are, and with studied elaboration gives us long categories of his sins, so that we may have no doubt that he knows whereof he speaks! As a matter of fact,