"<p>What can you do about the plunge into darkness, the general destruction, the universal suffering? nothing and everything. This is nothing and everything: if you do not participate in the darkness with your own feelings and create in yourself a state of whole-manhood: you are guided not by your desires but by the eternal measure. Wherever the tide takes you: to misery, to prosperity, to forced labour, to the battlefield, to the driving-place, to the perishing-place: care not; the dark power can give you nothing and take nothing from you, if the only-virtuous measure is at work in you. You may lose your comfort, your wealth, your health, your freedom, your life; you will lose them all sooner or later, you cannot take them to the grave; but the perfect measure in your depths cannot be violated even by the destruction of the world, so you must wish to be true to it. Trust thyself to the eternal measure: it is the Noah's ark above the all-covering flood.<br />For your fellow human beings you can do no more than let them know the only way of escape. No one can be saved by force when the flood covers everything.<br />It is not true that in a flood the crowd wants to climb Noah's Ark. The Noah's ark seems to be the weakest, most clumsy piece of wood, worth more than the bottom of a bush.</p>"