To a Good Many by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

O blind and selfish! Helpless as the beast / Who sees no meaning in a soul released / And given flesh to grow in-to work through! / Think you that God has nothing else to do / Than babble endlessly the same set phrase? / Are life's great spreading, upward-reaching ways / Laid for the beasts to climb on till the top / Is reached in you, you think, and there you stop! / They were raised up, obedient to force / Which lifted them, unwitting of their course. / You have new power, new consciousness, new sight; / You can help God! You stand in the great light / Of seeing him at work. You can go on / And walk with him, and feel the glory won. / And here you sit, content to toil and strive / To keep your kind of animal alive! / Why, friends! God is not through! / The universe is not complete in you. / You're just as bound to follow out his plan / And sink yourself in ever-growing Man / As ever were the earliest, crudest eggs / To grow to vertebrates with arms and legs. / Society holds not its present height / Merely that you may bring a child to light; / But you and yours live only in the plan / That's working out a higher kind of man; / A higher kind of life, that shall let grow / New powers and nobler duties than you know. / Rise to the thought! Live in the widening race! / Help make the State more like God's dwelling-place! / New paths for life divine, as yet untrod,- / A social body for the soul of God!