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Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays

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Title: Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays

Author: J. G. Holland


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8932]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LESSONS IN LIFE; A SERIES OF FAMILIAR ESSAYS ***




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LESSONS IN LIFE.

A SERIES OF FAMILIAR ESSAYS.


BY

TIMOTHY TITCOMB,
AUTHOR OF "LETTERS TO THE YOUNG," "GOLD-FOIL," ETC.




PREFACE.


The quick and cordial reception which greeted the author's
"Letters to the Young," and his more recent series of essays
entitled "Gold Foil," and the constant and substantial friendship
which has been maintained by the public toward those productions,
must stand as his apology for this third venture in a kindred
field of effort. It should be--and probably is--unnecessary for
the author to say that in this book, as in its predecessors, he
has aimed to be neither brilliant nor profound. He has endeavored,
simply, to treat in a familiar and attractive way a few of the
more prominent questions which concern the life of every
thoughtful man and woman. Indeed, he can hardly pretend to have
done more than to organize, and put into form, the average
thinking of those who read his books--to place before the people
the sum of their own choicer judgments--and he neither expects nor
wishes for these essays higher praise than that which accords to
them the quality of common sense.

SPRINGFIELD, MASS., _November_, 1861.



CONTENTS.

LESSON I. MOODS AND FRAMES OF MIND
LESSON II. BODILY IMPERFECTIONS AND IMPEDIMENTS
LESSON III. ANIMAL CONTENT
LESSON IV. REPRODUCTION IN KIND
LESSON V. TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS
LESSON VI. MISTAKES OF PENANCE
LESSON VII. THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN
LESSON VIII. AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION
LESSON IX. PERVERSENESS
LESSON X. UNDEVELOPED RESOURCES
LESSON XI. GREATNESS IN LITTLENESS
LESSON XII. RURAL LIFE
LESSON XIII. REPOSE
LESSON XIV. THE WAYS OF CHARITY
LESSON XV. MEN OF ONE IDEA
LESSON XVI. SHYING PEOPLE
LESSON XVII. FAITH IN HUMANITY
LESSON XVIII. SORE SPOTS AND SENSITIVE SPOTS
LESSON XIX. THE INFLUENCE OF PRAISE
LESSON XX. UNNECESSARY BURDENS
LESSON XXI. PROPER PEOPLE AND PERFECT PEOPLE
LESSON XXII. THE POETIC TEST
LESSON XXIII. THE FOOD OF LIFE
LESSON XXIV. HALF-FINISHED WORK




LESSONS IN LIFE.



LESSON I.

MOODS AND FRAMES OF MIND.


                "That blessed mood
   In which the burden of the mystery,
   In which the heavy and the weary weight
   Of all this unintelligible world
   Is lightened." WORDSWORTH.

  "Oh, blessed temper, whose unclouded ray
   Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day."
   POPE.

  "My heart and mind and self, never in tune;
   Sad for the most part, then in such a flow
   Of spirits, I seem now hero, now buffoon."
   LEIGH HUNT.

It rained yesterday; and, though it is midsummer, it is
unpleasantly cool to-day. The sky is clear, with almost a
steel-blue tint, and the meadows are very deeply green. The
shadows among the woods are black and massive, and the whole
face of nature looks painfully clean, like that of a healthy
little boy who has been bathed in a chilly room with very cold
water. I notice that I am sensitive to a change like this, and
that my mind goes very reluctantly to its task this morning.
I look out from my window, and think how delightful it would be
to take a seat in the sun, down under the fence, across the
street. It seems to me that if I could sit there awhile, and get
warm, I could think better and write better. Toasting in the
sunlight is conducive rather to reverie than thought, or I should
be inclined to try it. This reluctance to commence labor, and
this looking out of the window and longing for an accession of
strength, or warmth, or inspiration, or something or other not
easily named, calls back to me an experience of childhood.

It was summer, and I was attending school. The seats were hard,
and the lessons were dry, and the walls of the school-room were
very cheerless. An indulgent, sweet-faced girl was my teacher; and
I presume that she felt the irksomeness of the confinement quite
as severely as I did. The weather was delightful, and the birds
were singing everywhere; and the thought came to me, that if I
could only stay out of doors, and lie down in the shadow of a
tree, I could get my lesson. I begged the privilege of trying the
experiment. The kind heart that presided over the school-room
could not resist my petition; so I was soon lying in the coveted
shadow. I went to work very severely; but the next moment found
my eyes wandering; and heart, feeling, and fancy were going up and
down the earth in the most vagrant fashion. It was hopeless
dissipation to sit under the tree; and discovering a huge rock on
the hillside, I made my way to that, to try what virtue there
might be in a shadow not produced by foliage. Seated under the
brow of the boulder, I again applied myself to the dim-looking
text, but it had become utterly meaningless; and a musical cricket
under the rock would have put me to sleep if I had permitted
myself to remain. I found that neither tree nor rock would lend me
help; but down in the meadow I saw the brook sparkling, and
spanning it, a little bridge where I had been accustomed to sit,
hanging my feet over the water, and angling for minnows. It seemed
as if the bridge and the water might do something for me, and, in
a few minutes, my feet were dangling from the accustomed seat.
There, almost under my nose, close to the bottom of the clear,
cool stream, lay a huge speckled trout, fanning the sand with his
slow fins, and minding nothing about me at all. What could a boy
do with Colburn's First Lessons, when a living trout, as large and
nearly as long as his arm, lay almost within the reach of his
fingers? How long I sat there I do not know, but the tinkle of a
distant bell startled me, and I startled the trout, and fish and
vision faded before the terrible consciousness that I knew less of
my lesson than I did when I left the school-house.

This has always been my fortune when running after, or looking
for, moods. There is a popular hallucination that makes of
authors a romantic people who are entirely dependent upon moods
and moments of inspiration for the power to labor in their
peculiar way. Authors are supposed to write when they "feel like
it," and at no other time. Visions of Byron with a gin-bottle at
his side, and a beautiful woman hanging over his shoulder, dashing
off a dozen stanzas of Childe Harold at a sitting, flit through
the brains of sentimental youth. We hear of women who are seized
suddenly by an idea, as if it were a colic, or a flea, often at
midnight, and are obliged to rise and dispose of it in some way.
We are told of very delicate girls who carry pencils and cards
with them, to take the names and address of such angels as may
visit them in out-of-the-way places. We read of poets who go on
long sprees, and after recovery retire to their rooms and work
night and day, eating not and sleeping little, and in some
miraculous way producing wonderful literary creations. The mind of
a literary man is supposed to be like a shallow summer brook, that
turns a mill. There is no water except when it rains, and the
weather being very fickle, it is never known when there will be
water. Sometimes, however, there comes a freshet, and then the
mill runs night and day, until the water subsides, and another dry
time comes on.

Now, while I am aware, as every writer must be, that the brain
works very much better at some times than it does at others, I can
declare without reservation, that no man who depends upon moods
for the power to write can possibly accomplish much. I know men
who rely upon their moods, alike for the disposition and the
ability to write, but they are, without exception, lazy and
inefficient men. They never have accomplished much, and they never
will accomplish much. Regular eating, regular sleeping, regular
working--these are the secrets of all true literary success. A
man may throw off a single little poem by a spasm, but he cannot
write a poem of three thousand lines by spasms. Spasms that
produce poems like this, must last from five to seven hours a day,
through six days of every week, and four weeks of every month,
until the work shall be finished. There is no good reason why the
mind will not do its best by regular exercise and usage. The mower
starts in the morning with a lame back and with aching joints; but
he keeps on mowing, and the glow rises, and the perspiration
starts, and he becomes interested in his labor, and, at length, he
finds himself at work with full efficiency. He was not in the mood
for mowing when he began, but mowing brought its own mood, and he
knew it would when he began. The mind is sometimes lame in the
morning. It refuses to go to work. Our wills seem entirely
insufficient to drive it to its tasks; but if it be driven to its
work and held to it persistently, and held thus every day, it will
ultimately be able to do its best every day. A man who works his
brains for a living, must work them just as regularly as the
omnibus-driver does his horses.

We sometimes go to church and hear a preacher who depends upon his
moods for the power to preach his best. He preaches well, and we
say that he is in the mood; and then again he preaches poorly, and
we say that he is not in the mood. A public singer who has the
power to move us at her will, comes into the concert-room, and
gives her music without spirit and without making any apparent
effort to please. We say that Madame or Mademoiselle is "not in
the mood to-night." A lecturer has his moods, which, apparently,
he slips on and off as he would a dressing-gown, charming the
people of one town by his eloquence and elegance, and disgusting
another by his dullness and carelessness. We are in the habit of
saying that certain men are very unequal in their performances,
which is only a way of saying that they are moody, and dependent
upon and controlled by moods. I think that, in any work or walk of
life, a man can in a great degree become the master of his moods,
so that, as a preacher, or a singer, or a lecturer, he can do his
best every time quite as regularly as a writer can do his best
every time. Mr. Benedict somewhat inelegantly remarked, when in
this country, that the reason of Jenny Lind's success was, that
she "made a conscience of her art." If we had asked Mr. Benedict
to explain himself, he probably would have said that she
conscientiously did her best every time, in every place. This was
true of Jenny Lind. She never failed. She sang just as well in the
old church where the country people had flocked to greet her, as
in the halls of the metropolis. Yet Jenny Lind was decidedly a
woman of moods, and indulged in them when she could afford it.

The power of the will over moods of the mind is very noticeable in
children. Children often rise in the morning in any thing but an
amiable frame of mind. Petulant, impatient, quarrelsome, they
cannot be spoken to or touched without producing an explosion of
ill-nature. Sleep seems to have been a bath of vinegar to them,
and one would think the fluid had invaded their mouth and nose,
and eyes and ears, and had been absorbed by every pore of their
sensitive skins. In a condition like this, I have seen them bent
over the parental knee, and their persons subjected to blows from
the parental palm; and they have emerged from the infliction with
the vinegar all expelled, and their faces shining like the
morning--the transition complete and satisfactory to all the
parties. Three-quarters of the moods that men and women find
themselves in, are just as much under the control of the will as
this. The man who rises in the morning, with his feelings all
bristling like the quills of a hedge-hog, simply needs to be
knocked down. Like a solution of certain salts, he requires a rap
to make him crystallize. A great many mean things are done in the
family for which moods are put forward as the excuse, when the
moods themselves are the most inexcusable things of all. A man or
a woman in tolerable health has no moral right to indulge in an
unpleasant mood, or to depend upon moods for the performance of
the duties of life. If a bad mood come to such persons as these,
it is to be shaken off by a direct effort of the will, under all
circumstances.

There are moods, however, for which men are not responsible, and
the parent of these is sickness--the feeble or inharmonious
movements of the body. When my little boy wakes in the morning,
his smile is as bright as the pencil of sunlight that lies across
his coverlet; but when evening comes, he is peevish and fretful.
The little limbs are weary, and the mood is produced by weariness.
So my friend with a harassing cough is in a melancholy mood, and
my bilious friend is in a severe and savage mood, or in a dark and
gloomy mood, or in a petulant mood, or in a fearful or foreboding
mood. In truth, bile is the prolific mother of moods. The stream
of life flows through the biliary duct. When that is obstructed,
life is obstructed. When the golden tide sets back upon the liver,
it is like backwater under a mill; it stops the driving-wheel.
Bile spoils the peace of families, breaks off friendships, cuts
off man from communion with his Maker, colors whole systems of
theology, transforms brains into putty, and destroys the comfort
of a jaundiced world. The famous Dr. Abernethy had his hobby, as
most famous men have; and this hobby was "blue pill and ipecac,"
which he prescribed for every thing, with the supposition, I
presume, that all disease has its origin in the liver. Most moods,
I am sure, have their birth in the derangements of this important
organ; and while the majority of them can be controlled, there are
others for which their victims are not responsible. There are men
who cannot insult me, because I will not take an insult from them
any more than I would from a man intoxicated. When their bile
starts, I am sure they will come to me and apologize.

We all have acquaintances who are men of moods. Whenever we meet
them, we try to determine which of their moods is dominant, that
we may know how to treat them. If the severe mood be on, we would
just as soon think of whistling at a funeral as indulging in a
jest; but if the cloud be off, we have a sprightly friend and a
pleasant time with him. Goldsmith's pedagogue was a man of moods,
and his pupils understood them.

  "A man severe he was, and stern to view;
   I knew him well, and every truant knew:
   _Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
   The day's disasters in his morning face_;
   Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee
   At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
   Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
   Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned."

While I maintain that a man can generally be the master of his
moods, I am very well aware that but few men are; and it is wise
for us to know how to deal with them. The secret of many a man's
success in the world resides in his insight into the moods of men,
and his tact in dealing with them. Modern Christian philanthropists
tell us that if we would do good to the soul of a starving child, we
must first put food into his mouth, and comfortable clothing upon
his body. This, by way of manifesting a practical interest in his
welfare, and paving our way to his heart by a form of kindness which
he can thoroughly appreciate. But there is more in such an act than
this,--we change his mood. From a mood of despair or discouragement,
we translate him into a mood of cheerfulness and hopefulness; and
then we have a soul to deal with that is surrounded by the
conditions of improvement. There is much more than divine duty and
Christian forgiveness in the injunction: "if thine enemy hunger, feed
him;  if he thirst, give him drink." The highest wisdom would dictate
such a policy for changing his mood, and bringing him into a condition
in which he could entertain a sense of his meanness.

It is curious to see how much fulness and emptiness of stomach
have to do with moods. A business man who has been at work hard
all day, will enter his house for dinner as crabbed as a hungry
bear--crabbed because he is as hungry as a hungry bear. The wife
understands the mood, and, while she says little to him, is
careful not to have the dinner delayed. In the mean time, the
children watch him cautiously, and do not tease him with
questions. When the soup is gulped, and he leans back and wipes
his mouth, there is an evident relaxation, and his wife ventures
to ask for the news. When the roast beef is disposed of, she
presumes upon gossip, and possibly upon a jest; and when, at last,
the dessert is spread upon the table, all hands are merry, and the
face of the husband and father, which entered the house so pinched
and savage and sharp, becomes soft and full and beaming as the
face of the round summer moon. Children are very sensitive to the
influence of hunger; and often when we think that we are
witnessing some fearful proof of the total depravity of human
nature in a young child, we are only witnessing the natural
expression of a desire for bread and milk. The politicians and all
that class of men who have axes to grind, understand this business
very thoroughly. If a measure is to be carried through, and any
man wishes to secure votes for it, he gives a dinner. If a man
wishes for a profitable contract, he gives a dinner. If he is up
for a fat office, he gives a dinner. If it is desirable that a pair
of estranged friends be brought together, and reconciled to each
other, they are invited to a dinner. If hostile interests are to be
harmonized, and clashing measures compromised, and divergent forces
brought into parallelism, all must be effected by means of a dinner.
A good dinner produces a good mood,--at least, it produces an
impressible mood. The will relaxes wonderfully under the influence
of iced champagne, and canvas-backs are remarkable softeners of
prejudice. The daughter of Herodias took Herod at a great
disadvantage, when she came in and danced before him and his friends
at his birth-day supper, and secured the head of John the Baptist.
No one, I presume, believes that if she had undertaken to dance before
him when he was hungry, she would have had the offer of a gift equal
to the half of his kingdom. It is more than likely that, under any
other circumstances, he would have been told to "sit down and show
less." It is by means of food and drink, and various entertainments
of the senses, that moods are manufactured, and used as media of
approach to the wills which it is desirable to bend or direct.

I have found moods to be very poor tests of character. Having cut
through the crust of a most forbidding mood, produced by bodily
derangement or constant and pressing labor of the brain, I have
often found a heart full of all the sweetest and richest traits of
humanity. I have found, too, that some natures know the door that
leads through the moods of other natures. There are men who never
present their moody side to me. My neighbor enters their presence
and finds them severe in aspect, hard in feeling, and abrupt in
speech. I go in immediately after, and open the door right through
that mood, into the genial good heart that sits behind it, and the
door always flies open when I come. I know men whose mood is
usually exceedingly pleasant. There is a glow of health upon their
faces. Their words are musical to women and children. They are
cheerful and chipper and sunshiny, and not easily moved to anger;
and yet I know them to be liars and full of selfishness. Under
their sweet mood, which sound health and a not over-sensitive
conscience and the satisfactions of sense engender, they conceal
hearts that are as false and foul as any that illustrate the reign
of sin in human nature. Many a Christian has times of feeling that
God is in a special manner smiling upon him, and communing with
him, and filling him with the peace and joy that only flow from
heavenly fountains, when the truth is that he is only in a good
mood. He is well, all the machinery of his mind and body is
playing harmoniously, and, of course, he feels well, and that is
all there is about it. He is not a better Christian than he was
when he slipped into the mood, and no better than he will be when
he slips out of it. If he really be a good Christian, his moods
operate like clouds and blue sky. The sun shines all the time, and
the cloudy moods only hide it;--they do not extinguish it.

There are many sad cases of insanity of a religious character
which originate in moods. A man, through a period of health, has a
bright and cheerful religious experience. The world looks pleasant
to him, the heavens smile kindly upon him, and the Divine Spirit
witnesses with his own that he is at peace and in harmony with
God. Joy thrills him as he greets the morning light, and peace
nestles upon his heart as he lies down to his nightly rest. He
feels in his soul the influx of spiritual life from the Great
Source of all life, as he opens it in worship and in prayer. But
at length there comes a change. A strange sadness creeps into his
heart. The sky that was once so bright has become dark. The prayer
that once rose as easily as incense upon the still morning air,
straight toward heaven, will not rise at all, but settles like
smoke upon him, and fills his eyes with tears. Something seems to
have come between him and his God. Strange, accusing voices are
heard within him. However deep the agony that moves him, he cannot
rend the cloud that interposes between him and his Maker. This,
now, is simply a mood produced by ill health; and I hope that
everybody who reads this will remember it. Remember that God never
changes, that a man's moods are constantly changing, and that when
a man earnestly seeks for spiritual peace, and cannot find it, and
thinks that he has committed the unpardonable sin without knowing
it, he is bilious, and needs medical treatment. Alas! what
multitudes of sad souls have walked out of this hopeless mood into
a life-long insanity, when all they needed in the first place,
perhaps, was a dose of blue pills, or half a dozen strings of
tenpins, or a sea-voyage sufficiently rough for "practical
purposes."

This subject I find to be abundantly prolific, and I see that I
have been able to do hardly more than to hint at its more
prominent aspects. It seems to me that moods only need to be
studied more, and to be better understood, to bring them very much
under the domain of our wills. A great deal is learned when we
know what a mood is, and know that we are subject to varying
frames of mind, resulting from causes which affect our health. If
I know that I am impatient and cross because I am hungry, then I
know how to get rid of my mood, and how to manage it until I do
get rid of it. If I feel unable to labor, not because I am
feeble, but because I am not in the mood, then I have the mood in
my hands, to be dealt with intelligently. If my reason tell me
that it is only a mood that hides from me the face of my Maker, my
reason will also tell me that my first business is to get rid of
my mood, and that my will must approach the work, directly or
indirectly. We are always and necessarily in some mood of mind--in
some condition of passion or feeling. It is the intensification
and the dominant influence of moods that are to be guarded against
or destroyed. Moods are dangerous only when they obscure reason,
and destroy self-control, and disturb the mental poise, and become
the media of false impressions from all the life around us and
within us.




LESSON II.

BODILY IMPERFECTIONS AND IMPEDIMENTS.


  "I that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
   Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
   Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
   Into this breathing world, scarce half made up."
   RICHARD III.

  "None can be called deformed but the unkind."
   SHAKSPEARE.

  "'Tis true, his nature may with faults abound;
   But who will cavil when the heart is sound?"
   STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

It is a bright June morning. The fresh grass is loaded with dew,
every bead of which sparkles in the light of the brilliant sun. A
big, yellow-shouldered bee comes booming through the open window,
and buzzes up and down my room, and threatens my shrinking ears,
and then dives through the window again; and his form recedes and
his hum dies away, as if it were the note of a reed-stop in the
"swell" of a church organ. There is such confusion in the songs of
the birds, that I can hardly select the different notes, so as to
name their owners. There is a great deal of bird-singing that is
simply what a weaver would call "filling." Robins and bobolinks
and blue-birds and sundry other favorites furnish the warp, and
color and characterize the tapestry of a flowing, vocal morning;
while the little, gray-backed multitude work in the neutral ground
tones, and bring the sweeter and more elaborate notes into
beautiful relief. Thus, with a little aid of imagination, I get up
some very exquisite fabrics--vocal silks and satins:--robins on a
field of chickadees; bobolinks and thrushes alternately on a
hit-or-miss ground of blackbirds, wrens, and pewees. Into the midst
of all this delicious confusion there breaks a note that belongs to
another race of creatures; and as I look from my window, and see
the singer, my eyes fill with tears. It is a little boy, possibly
twelve years old, though he looks younger, walking with a crutch.
One withered limb dangles as he goes. He is a cripple for life;
yet his face is as bright and cheerful as the face of the morning
itself; and what do you think he is singing? "Hail Columbia, happy
land," at the top of his lungs! The birds are merrily wheeling
over his head, and diving through the air, and moving here and
there as freely as the wind, yet not one among them carries a
lighter heart than that which he is jerking along by the side of
the little crutch.

As I see how cheerfully he bears the burden of his hopeless
halting, there comes back to me the story of the lame lord who
sang a different sort of song--the lame lord who died at
Missolonghi, and whose friend Trelawny--human jackal that he was--
stole to his bedside after the breath had left his body, and
examined his clubbed feet, and then went away and wrote about
them. Here was a man with regal gifts of mind--a poet of splendid
genius--a titled aristocrat--a man admired and praised wherever
the English language was read--a man who knew that he held within
himself the power to make his name immortal--a man with wealth
sufficient for all grateful luxuries--yet with clubbed feet; and
those feet! Ah! how they embittered and spoiled that man of
magnificent achievements and sublime possibilities! It would
appear, from the disgusting narrative of Mr. Trelawny, that he was
in reality the only man who had ever seen Byron's feet. Those feet
had been kept so closely hidden, or so cunningly disguised, that
nobody had known their real deformity; and the poor lord who had
carried them through his thirty-six years of life, had done it in
constantly tormented and mortified pride. Those misshapen organs
had an important agency in making him a misanthropic, morbidly
sensitive, unhappy, desperate man. When he sang, he did not forget
them; and the poor fools who turned down their shirt-collars, and
imitated his songs, and thought they were inspired by his winged
genius, had under them only a pair of halting, clubbed feet.

There is a class of unfortunate men and women in the world to whom
the boy and the bard have introduced us. They are not all lame:
but they all think they have cause to be dissatisfied with the
bodies God has given them. Perhaps they are simply ugly, and are
aware that no one can look in their faces with other thought than
that they are ugly. Now it is a pleasant thing to have a pleasant
face, and an agreeable form. It is pleasant for a man to be large,
well-shaped, and good-looking, and it is unpleasant for him to be
small, and to carry an ill-shaped form and an ugly face. It is
pleasant for a woman to feel that she has personal attractions for
those around her, and it is unpleasant for her to feel that no man
can ever turn his eyes admiringly upon her. A misshapen limb, a
hump in the back, a withered arm, a shortened leg, a clubbed foot,
a hare-lip, an unwieldy corpulence, a hideous leanness, a bald
head--all these are unpleasant possessions, and all these, I
suppose, give their possessors, first and last, a great deal of
pain. Then there is the taint of an unpopular blood, that a whole
race carry with them as a badge of humiliation. I have heard of
Africans who declared that they would willingly go through the
pain of being skinned alive, if, at the close of the operation,
they could become white men. There are men of genius, with plenty
of white blood in their veins--with only a trace of Africa in
their faces--whose lives are embittered by that trace; and who
know that the pure Anglo Saxon, if he follows his instincts, will
say to him: "Thus far,"--(through a limited range of relations,)--
"but no further."

From the depths of my soul I pity a man or woman who bears about
an irremediable bodily deformity, or the mark of the blood of a
humiliated race. I pity any human being who carries around a body
that he feels to be in any sense an unpleasant one to those whom
he meets. I pity the deformed man, and the maimed man, and the
terribly ugly man, and the black man, and the white man with black
blood in him, because he usually feels that these things bear with
them a certain degree of humiliation. I pity the man who is not
able to stand out in the broad sunlight, with other men, and to
feel that he has as goodly a frame and as fine blood and as
pleasant a presence as the average of those he sees around him. I
do not wonder at all that many of these persons become soured and
embittered and jealous. A sensitive mind, dwelling long upon
misfortunes of this peculiar character, will inevitably become
morbid; and multitudes of humbler men than Lord Byron have cursed
their fate as bitterly as he, and have even lifted their eyes to
blaspheme the Being who made them.

The two instances which I have mentioned show us that there are
two ways of taking misfortunes of this character; and one of them
seems to a good deal better than the other. Between the boy who
ignored the withered leg and the crutch, and the proud poet who
permitted a slight personal deformity to darken his whole life,
there is a distance like that between heaven and earth.

I believe in the law of compensation. Human lot is, on the whole,
well averaged. A man does not possess great gifts of person and of
mind without drawbacks somewhere. Either great duties are imposed
upon him, or great burdens are put upon his shoulders, or great
temptations assail and harass him. Something in his life, at some
time in his life, takes it upon itself to reduce his advantages to
the average standard. Nature gave Byron clubbed feet, but with
those feet she gave him a genius whose numbers charmed the world--
a genius which multitudes of commonplace or weak men would have
been glad to purchase at the price of almost any humiliating
eccentricity of person. But they were obliged to content
themselves with excellent feet, and brains of the common kind and
calibre. Providence had withered the little boy's leg, but the
loudest song I have heard from a boy in a twelvemonth came from
his lips, as he limped along alone in the open street. The
cheerful heart in his bosom was a great compensation for the
withered leg; and beyond this the boy had reason for singing over
the fact that he was forever released from military duty, and
firemen's duty, and all racing about in the service of other
people. There are individual cases of misfortune in which it is
hard to detect the compensating good, but these we must call the
"exceptions" which "prove the rule."

But the best of all compensation for natural defects and
deformities, is that which comes in the form of a peculiar love.
The mother of a poor, misshapen, idiotic boy, will, though she
have half a score of bright and beautiful children besides,
entertain for him a peculiar affection. He may not be able, in his
feeble-mindedness, to appreciate it, but her heart brims with
tenderness for him. The delicate morsel is reserved for him; and,
if he be a sufferer, the softest pillow and the tenderest nursing
will be his. A love will be bestowed upon him which gold could not
buy, and which no beauty of person, and no brilliancy of natural
gifts could possibly awaken. It is thus with every case of defect
or eccentricity of person. So sure as the mother of a child sees
in that child's person any reason for the world to regard it with
contempt or aversion, does she treat it with peculiar tenderness;
as if she were commissioned by God--as indeed she is--to make up
to it in the best coinage that which the world will certainly
neglect to bestow.

With the world at large, however, there are certain conditions on
which this variety of compensation is rendered; and a man who
would have compensation for defects of person, must accept these
conditions, or furnish them. Such a man as Lord Byron would have
been offended by pity. To have been commiserated on his
misfortune, would have made him exceedingly angry. He would not
allow himself to be treated as an unfortunate man. He bound up his
feet, and made efforts to walk that ended in intense pain, rather
than appear the lame man that he really was. Of course, there was
no compensation in the tender pity and affectionate consideration
of the world for him; nor is there any for the sad unfortunates
who inherit and exercise his spirit. But for all those who accept
their life with all its conditions, in a cheerful spirit, who give
up their pride, who take their bodies as God formed them, and make
the best of them, there is abundant compensation in the affection
of the world. A cheerful spirit, exercised in weakness, infirmity,
calamity--any sort of misfortune--is just as sure to awaken a
peculiarly affectionate interest in all observers, as a lighted
lamp is to illuminate the objects around it. I know of men and
women who are the favorites of a whole neighborhood--nay, a whole
town--because they are cheerful, and courageous, and self-respectful
under misfortune; and I know of those who are as much dreaded as
a pestilence, because they will not accept their lot--because
they grow bitter and jealous--and because they will persist in
taunts and complaints.

The number of those who are, or who consider themselves,
unfortunate in their physical conformation, is larger than the
most of us suppose. I presume that at least one-half of the
readers of this essay are any thing but well satisfied with the
"tabernacle" in which they reside. One man wishes he were a little
larger; one woman wishes she were a little smaller; one does not
like her complexion, or the color of her eyes and hair; one has a
nose too large; another has a nose too small; one has round
shoulders; another has a low forehead; and so every one becomes a
critic of his or her style of structure. When we find a man or a
woman who is absolutely faultless in form and features, we usually
find a fool. I do not remember that I ever met a very handsome man
or woman, who was not as vain and shallow as a peacock. I recently
met a magnificent woman of middle age at a railroad station. She
was surrounded by all those indescribable somethings and nothings
which mark the rich and well-bred traveller, and her face was
queenly--not sweet and pretty like a doll's face--but handsome and
stylish, and strikingly impressive, so that no man could look at
her once without turning to look again; yet I had not been in her
presence a minute, before I found, to my utter disgust, that the
old creature was as vain of her charms as a spoiled girl, and
gloried in the attention which she was conscious her face
everywhere attracted. It would seem as if nature, in making up
mankind, had always been a little short of materials, so that, if
special attention were bestowed upon the form and face, the brain
suffered; and if the brain received particular attention, why then
there was something lacking in the body.

This large class of malcontents generally find some way of
convincing themselves, however, that they are as good-looking as
the average of mankind. They make a good deal of some special
points of beauty, and imagine that these quite overshadow their
defects. Still, there is a portion of them who can never do this;
and I think of them with a sadness which it is impossible for me
to express. For a homely--even an ugly man--I have no pity to
spare. I never saw one so ugly yet, that if he had brains and a
heart, he could not find a beautiful woman sensible enough to
marry him. But for the hopelessly plain and homely sisters--"these
tears!" There is a class of women who know that they possess in
their persons no attractions for men,--that their faces are
homely, that their frames are ill-formed, that their carriage is
clumsy, and that, whatever may be their gifts of mind, no man can
have the slightest desire to possess their persons. That there
are compensations for these women, I have no doubt, but many of
them fail to find them. Many of them feel that the sweetest
sympathies of life must be repressed, and that there is a world of
affection from which they must remain shut out forever. It is hard
for a woman to feel that her person is not pleasing--harder than
for a man to feel thus. I would tell why, if it were necessary--
for there is a bundle of very interesting philosophy tied up in
the matter--but I will content myself with stating the fact, and
permitting my readers to reason about it as they will.

Now, if a homely woman, soured and discouraged by her lot, becomes
misanthropic and complaining, she will be as little loved as she
is admired; but if she accepts her lot good-naturedly, makes up
her mind to be happy, and is determined to be agreeable in all her
relations to society, she will be everywhere surrounded by loving
and sympathetic hearts, and find herself a greater favorite than
she would be were she beautiful. A woman who is entirely beyond
the reach of the jealousy of her own sex, is an exceedingly
fortunate woman; and if personal homeliness has won for her this
immunity, then homeliness has given her much to be thankful for. A
homely woman who ignores her face and form, cultivates her mind
and manners, good-naturedly gives up all pretension, and exhibits
in all her life a true and a pure heart, will have friends enough
to compensate her entirely for the loss of a husband. Friendship
is unmindful of faces, in the selection of its objects, even if
love be somewhat particular, and, sometimes, foolishly fastidious.

Life is altogether too precious a gift to be thrown away. A man
who would permit a field to be overgrown with weeds and thorns
simply because it would not naturally produce roses, would be very
foolish, particularly if the ground should only need cultivation
to enable it to yield abundantly of corn. Far be it from me to
depreciate physical symmetry and personal comeliness. They are
gifts of God, and they are very good; but there are better things
in this world than a good face, and better things than the
admiration which a good face wins. I am more and more convinced,
as the years pass away, that the choicest thing this world has for
a man is affection--not any special variety of affection, but the
approval, the sympathy, and the devotion of true hearts. It is not
necessary that this affection come from the great and the
powerful. If it be genuine, that is all the heart asks. It does
not criticize and graduate the value of the fountains from which
it springs. It is at these fountains particularly that the
unfortunates of the world are permitted to drink. They have only
to accept cheerfully the conditions of their lot, and to give free
and full play to all that is good and generous in them, to secure
in an unusual degree the love of those into whose intimate
society Providence has thrown them.

It is stated by Dr. Livingstone, the celebrated explorer of
Africa, that the blow of a lion's paw upon his shoulder, which was
so severe as to break his arm, completely annihilated fear; and he
suggests that it is possible that Providence has mercifully
arranged, that all those beasts that prey upon life shall have
power to destroy the sting of death in the animals which are their
natural victims. I do not believe that this power is mercifully
assigned to beasts of prey alone, but that the misfortunes that
assail our limbs and forms, in whatever shape and at whatever time
they may come, bring with them something which lightens the blow,
or obviates the pain, if we will accept it. There is a calm
consciousness in every soul, however harshly the lion's paw may
fall upon the body which it inhabits, that it is itself
invulnerable--that whatever may be the condition of the body, the
soul cannot be injured by physical forms or forces.

Physical calamity never comes with the power to extinguish that
which is essential to the highest manhood and womanhood, and never
fails to bring with it a motive for the adjustment of the soul to
its conditions. The little boy whose "Hail Columbia" has been
ringing in my ears all day, accepted the conditions of his life,
and the sting of his calamity has departed. It is pleasant to say
to him, and to all the brotherhood and sisterhood of ugliness and
lameness, that there is every reason to believe that there is no
such thing in heaven as a one-legged or a club-footed soul--no
such thing as an ugly or a misshapen soul--no such thing as a
blind or a deaf soul--no such thing as a soul with tainted blood
in its veins; and that out of these imperfect bodies will spring
spirits of consummate perfection and angelic beauty--a beauty
chastened and enriched by the humiliations that were visited upon
their earthly habitation.




LESSON III.

ANIMAL CONTENT.


  "By sports like these are all their cares beguiled;
   The sports of children satisfy the child." GOLDSMITH.

  "Ay, give me back the joyous hours
   When I, myself, was ripening too;
   When song, the fount flung up its showers
   Of beauty, ever fresh and new." GOETHE'S FAUST.

I have been watching a family of kittens, engaged in their
exquisitely graceful play. Near them lay their mother, stretched
at her length upon the flagging, taking her morning nap, and
warming herself in the sun. She had eaten her breakfast, (provided
by no care of her own, but at my expense,) had seen her little
family fed, and having nothing further to attend to, had gone off
into a doze. What a blessed freedom from care! Think of a family
of four children, with no frocks to be made for them, no hair to
brush, no shoes to provide, no socks to knit and mend, no
school-books to buy, and no nurse! Think of a living being with the
love of offspring in her bosom, and a multitude of marvellous
instincts in her nature, yet knowing nothing of God, thinking not
of the future, without a hope or an expectation, or a doubt or a
fear, passing straight on to annihilation! At the threshold of this
destiny the little kittens were carelessly playing; and they are
doubtless still playing, while I write. They have no lessons to
learn, they do not have to go to Sunday-school, they entertain no
prejudices, except against dogs which occasionally dodge into the
yard; and I judge, by the familiar way in which they play with
their mother's ears, and pounce upon her tail, that they are not
in any degree oppressed by a sense of the respect due to a parent.
Cat and kittens will eat, and frolic, and sleep, through their
brief life, and then they will curl up in some dark corner and
die.

I remember that in one of the late Mr. Joseph C. Neal's "Charcoal
Sketches," he puts into the mouth of a very sad and seedy loafer
the expression of a wish that he were a pig, and a statement of
the reasons for the wish. These reasons, as I recall them, related
to the freedom of the pig from the peculiar trials and troubles of
humanity. Pigs do not have to work for a living; they undertake no
enterprizes, and of course fail in none; they eat and sleep
through a period of months, and then come the knife and a grunt,
and that is the last of them. Now I suppose this thought of Mr.
Neal's loafer has been shared by millions of men. Not that
everybody has at some time in his life wished he were a pig, but
that nearly everybody who has had his share of the troubles and
responsibilities of life, has looked upon simple animal
carelessness and content with a certain degree of envy. It is not
necessary to go among brutes for instances of this animal content.
It can be found among men. Who does not know good-natured,
ignorant, healthy fellows, who will work all day in the field,
whistle all the way homeward, eat hugely of course food, sleep
like logs, and take no more interest in the great questions which
agitate the most of us, than the pigs they feed, and that, in
return, feed them? Who has not sighed, as he has seen how easily
the simple wants of certain simple natures are supplied? I
remember an old man who quite unexpectedly was drafted into the
grand jury, which sat in the county town less than ten miles
distant from his home; and this was the great event of his life.
He never tired of talking about it--(never tired himself, I mean,)
and a stranger could not carry on a conversation with him for five
minutes, without hearing of something which occurred when
"I was in Blanktown, on the Grand Jury." It is doubtful whether
Napoleon ever contemplated a victory with the complacent
satisfaction that filled my old friend when he alluded to his
connection with "the _grand_ jury," and emphasized the adjective
which magnified the jury and glorified him.

I confess that, when I pass through a rural town, and see the
laborers among the corn, and the boys driving their cattle, and
the girls busy in the dairies, and life passing away quietly, I
cannot avoid a twinge of regret that it would be impossible for me
to be content with the kind of life that I see around me,
especially as I know that there is one kind of pleasure--negative,
perhaps, rather than positive--which that kind of life enjoys, and
in which I can never share. Relief from great responsibilities,
and contentment with humble clothing, humble fare, humble society,
humble aims and ambitions, humble means and humble labors--ah! how
many weary, overloaded men--how many disappointed hearts--have
sighed for such a boon, and sighed knowing they could never
receive it.

It has been the habit of poets to surround simple pleasures and
pursuits with the golden atmosphere of romance,--not because they
would enjoy such pleasures and pursuits at all, but rather because
they are forever beyond their possession. A poet is always
reaching toward the unattainable, and he may reach forward to the
perfections of a life of which the best that he sees around him is
an intimation, or backward to the animal content of a life as yet
undisturbed by the intimation of something better. Bucolics are very
sweet, but their writers do not believe in them. "A nut-brown maid,"
with bare, unconscious feet and ancles, is very pretty in a picture,
but the man who painted her ascertained that she was green, and not
the most entertaining of companions. The truth is, that when we have
got along so far that we can perceive that which is poetical and
picturesque in the simplest form of rustic life, we have got too
far along to enjoy it.

I suppose that much of the charm which simple animal content has
for us, is connected with the memories of childhood. We can all
recall a period of our lives when there was joy in the consciousness
of living--when animal life, in its spontaneous overflow, flooded all
our careless hours with its own peculiar pleasure. The light was
pleasant to our eyes, vigorous appetite and digestion made ambrosia
of the homeliest fare, the simplest play brought delight, and
life--all untried--lay spread out before us in one long, golden
dream. We now watch our children at their sports, and see but little
difference between their sources of happiness and those which supply
the kittens in their play. "Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a
straw," they skip from pleasure to pleasure, and find delight in the
impulsive exercise of their little powers. We were once like them.
Life was once as fresh, and flowing, and impulsive, and objectless,
as it is with them; and when we are weary and oppressed with labor,
and loaded down with responsibility, and filled with thoughts of the
great destiny before us, we turn our eyes backward with a sigh for
days once ours, but lost forever. Lost forever! This is the romantic
pain that fills us in all our contemplations of simple animal
content. It is lost to us, because we are lost to it. Like a
passenger far out upon the sea, adventuring upon a long voyage, we
look back upon the fading hills of our native land, and sigh to
think that the breeze which bears us away can never bring us back.

The question comes to us: "What is there in our present life to
repay us for this loss?" There are multitudes who can ask this
question, and answer honestly, "Nothing." It is sad, but true,
that countless men and women have never found any thing in life
which compensates them for the loss of the simple animal enjoyment
and content of childhood. Sickness, perhaps, has imposed upon them
years of pain. Poverty has condemned them to labor through every
waking hour to win sustenance for themselves and their dependents.
The heart has been cheated of its idol. Friends have proved false,
and fortune fickle. Life has gone wrong through all the avenues of
their being. Yet there are others who, while looking with pleasure
upon the innocent sports of animal life, and recalling the simple
joys of childhood with delight, are content with the lot of
manhood and womanhood, and would look upon a return to their
simpler age as the greatest calamity that could be inflicted upon
them. With brows wrinkled by care and toil, and heads silvered by
premature age, and great burdens upon heart and brain, they glory
in a life within and before them, by the side of which the life of
childhood is as flavorless and frivolous as that of a fly.

I have been much impressed by a passage in the "Recreations of a
Country Parson,"--which, by the way, is one of the best and
cleverest books of its kind in the English language--in which this
question is incidentally touched upon, and so happily touched
upon, that I cannot refrain from transcribing the whole passage.
The writer represents himself to be seated upon a manger, writing
upon the flat place between his horse's eyes, while the docile
animal's nose is between his knees; and it is the horse that he
addresses:--

"For you, my poor fellow-creature, I think with sorrow as I write
here upon your head, there remains no such immortality as remains
for me. What a difference between us! You to your sixteen or
eighteen years here, and then oblivion!--I to my threescore and
ten, and then eternity! Yes, the difference is immense; and it
touches me to think of your life and mine, of your doom and mine.
I know a house where at morning and evening prayer, when the
household assembles, among the servants there always walks in a
shaggy little dog, who listens with the deepest attention and the
most solemn gravity to all that is said, and then, when prayers
are over, goes out again with his friends. I cannot witness that
silent procedure without being much moved by the sight. Ah! my
fellow-creature, this is something in which you have no part! Made
by the same hand, breathing the same air, sustained like us by
food and drink, you are witnessing an act of ours which relates to
interests that do not concern you, and of which you have no idea.
And so here we are, you standing at the manger, old boy, and I
sitting upon it; the mortal and the immortal, close together; your
nose on my knee, my paper on your head; yet with something between
us broader than the broad Atlantic."

Here we find one man pitying his poor, dumb, unconscious
companion, and the little dog that trots in to attend the morning
prayers, because their life is so brief, and, more particularly,
because it is so insignificant. He recognizes the feeble likeness
between himself and them, and appreciates also the tremendous
difference. He does not think that he would be glad to exchange
his lot of labor and care for their carelessness and content, but,
reaching forward to grasp the hand of an immortal destiny, he
sorrows that he must leave his dumb servants and companions behind
him.

And this is the normal view of the question. We rise out of
semi-conscious infancy into a life of the senses, which goes on to
perfection in our childhood. We come into a state in which the
mechanism of the body enjoys its freest play, in which the senses
imbibe their sweetest satisfactions, and in which life either
swells into irrepressible overflowings, or subsides into careless
content. Looking at her children at this period of their life,
many a mother has said, "Let them play while they can; let them be
merry while they may; for they are seeing their happiest days."
But this animal life is not all. In its perfection it is very
beautiful, and it is good because God made it; but it is only the
coarse basis upon which rises a shaft, whiter than marble--wrought
with divine devices--crowned by the light of Heaven. It is only
those who have failed to secure a distinct perception of the
highest aspect of human life, and of that which makes it
characteristically human life, who can say to a child that he is
seeing his happiest days.

I remember with entire distinctness the moment when the
consciousness possessed me that my childhood was transcended by
initial manhood, and I can never forget the pang that moment
brought me. It was on a bright, moonlight night, in midwinter,
when my mates, boisterous with life, were engaged in their usual
games in the snow, and I had gone out expecting to share in their
enjoyment. I had not played, or rather tried to play, five
minutes, before I found that there was nothing in the play for me--
that I had absolutely exhausted play as the grand pursuit of my
life. Never since has the wild laugh of boyhood sounded so vacant
and hollow, as it did to me that night. In an instant, the
invisible line was crossed which separated a life of purely animal
enjoyment from a life of moral motive and responsibility, and
intellectual action and enterprise. The old had passed away, and I
had entered that which was new; and I turned my steps homeward,
leaving behind me all my companions, to spend a quiet evening in
the chimney-corner, and dream of the realm that was opening before
me. Such a moment as this comes really, though not always
consciously, to every man and woman. To-day we are children;
to-morrow we are not. To-day we stand in life's vestibule;
to-morrow we are in the temple, awed by the sweep of the arches
over us, humbled by the cross that fronts us, and smitten with
mysteries that breathe upon us from the choir, or gaze at us from
the flaming windows.

Manhood and womanhood have their infancy entirely distinct from
the infancy of childhood. The child is born into the world a
simple, animal life--less helpful than a lamb, or a calf, or a
kitten. There is no power in it, and but little of instinct. There
is no form of life, bursting caul or shell, that awakes in vital
air to such stupid, vacant helplessness, as a baby. It is out of
this lump of clay, with its bones only half hardened, and its
muscles little more than pulp, and its brain no more intelligent
than an uncooked dumpling, that childhood is to be made. And this
childhood consists of little more than a well-developed animal
organism. Nature keeps the child playing--makes it play in the
open air--impels it to bring into free and joyous use all the
powers of its little frame--and when that is done, and the
procreative faculty has crowned all, the child is born again, and
comes into a new infancy--the infancy of manhood and womanhood.
Here a new life opens. That which gave satisfaction before, gives
satisfaction no longer. Love takes new and deeper channels.
Ambition fixes its eye upon other and higher objects. Fresh
motives address the soul, and urge it into new enterprises. Great
cares and responsibilities settle slowly down upon its shoulders,
and it braces itself up to endure them. It apprehends God and its
relations to Him, and to its fellows; it confronts destiny; it
arms itself for the conflicts of life; it prepares for the
struggle which it knows will issue in a grateful success or a sad
disappointment; in short, it grows from man's infancy into man's
full estate.

Now the reason why a mother looks with a sigh upon her children,
and says that they are seeing the happiest days of their life, is
that she has never become a true woman. She has never grown out of
the infancy of her womanhood. She has never comprehended what a
glorious thing it is to be a woman--she has not comprehended what
it is to be a woman at all. What can be that woman's ideas of
life, who thinks and declares that the happiest moments of her
experience were those which were filled with the frolic of animal
life? If I felt like this, I should wish that my children had been
born rabbits, or squirrels, or lambs, or kittens, because they,
having enjoyed the pleasures of the animal, will never awake to
the woes of another type of life. The real reason why any man
sings from the heart,

  "O, would I were a boy again,"

is, that he is "stuck"--to use a homely but expressive word--
between boyhood and manhood, and, not feeling up to his position,
has a very strong disposition to back out of it. The man who
really wishes he were a boy, is either painfully conscious of the
loss of the purity of his boyhood, or he has the cowardly
disposition to shirk the responsibilities of his life. The
romantic regard which we all entertain for the simple animal
content and joy of childhood, is a very different thing to this.
It was Mr. Neal's loafer that really wished he were a pig; and it
is a loafer always who would retire from man's duties and estate,
into the content either of childhood or kittenhood.

It is very natural that a man should be blinded and pained by
passing from a shaded room into dazzling sunlight. It is a serious
thing to leap from a luxurious, enervating warm bath into cold
water. All sudden transitions are shocking; and God has contrived
the transitions of our lives so that they shall be mainly gradual.
It is not to be wondered at that many men and women, by having
the responsibilities of men and women thrust upon them too early,
are shocked, and look back upon the shady places they have left,
and long to rest their eyes there. It is not strange that men
recoil from a plunge into the world's cold waters, and long to
creep back into the bath from which they have suddenly risen. But
that man or woman, having fully passed into the estate of man and
woman, should desire to become children again, is impossible. It
is only the half-developed, the badly-developed, the imperfectly
nurtured, the mean-spirited, and the demoralized, who look back to
the innocence, the helplessness, and the simple animal joy and
content of childhood with genuine regret for their loss. I want no
better evidence that a person's life is regarded by himself as a
failure, than that furnished by his honest willingness to be
restored to his childhood. When a man is ready to relinquish
the power of his mature reason, his strength and skill for
self-support, the independence of his will and life, his bosom
companion and children, his interest in the stirring affairs of
his time, his part in deciding the great questions which agitate
his age and nation, his intelligent apprehension of the relations
which exist between himself and his Maker, and his rational hope
of immortality--if he have one--for the negative animal content,
and frivolous enjoyments of a child, he does not deserve the name
of a man;--he is a weak, unhealthy, broken-down creature, or a
base poltroon.

Yet I know there are those who will read this sentence with tears,
and with complaint. I know there are those whose existence has
been a long struggle with sickness and trial--whose lives have
been crowded with great griefs and disappointments--who sit in
darkness and impotency while the world rolls by them. They have
seen no joy and felt no content since childhood, and many of them
look with genuine pity upon children, because the careless
creatures do not know into what a heritage of sin and sorrow they
are entering. I have only to say to them, that the noblest
exhibitions of manhood and womanhood I have ever seen, or the
world has ever seen, have been among their number. A woman with
the hope of heaven in her eyes, incorruptible virtue in her heart,
and honesty in every endeavor, has smiled serenely, a million
times in this world, while her life and all its earthly
expectations were in ruins. Patient sufferers upon beds of pain
have forgotten childhood years ago, and, feeding their souls on
prayer, have looked forward with unutterable joy to the transition
from womanhood to angelhood. Men, utterly forsaken by friends--
contemned, derided, proscribed, persecuted--have stood by their
convictions with joyful heroism and calm content. Nay, great
multitudes have marched with songs upon their tongues to the rack
and the stake. The noblest spectacle the world affords is that of
a man or woman, rising superior to sorrow and suffering--
transforming sorrow and suffering into nutriment--accepting those
conditions of their life which Providence prescribes, and building
themselves up into an estate from whose summit the step is short
to a glorified humanity.

Before me hangs the portrait of an old man--the only man I ever
loved with a devotion that has never faded, though long years have
passed away since he died. His calm blue eyes look down upon me,
and I look into them, and through them I look into a golden
memory--into a life of self-denial--into a meek, toiling, honest,
heroic Christian manhood--into an uncomplaining spirit--into a
grateful heart--into a soul that never sighed over a lost joy,
though all his earthly enterprises miscarried. The tracery of care
and of sickness is upon his haggard features, but I see in them,
and in the soul which they represent to me, the majesty of
manliness. While I look, the kittens still play at the door, and
the noise of shouting children is in the street; but ah! how
shallow is the life they represent, compared with that of which
this dumb canvas tells me! It is better to be a man or a woman,
than to be a child. It is better to be an angel than to be either.
Let us look forward--never backward.




LESSON IV.

REPRODUCTION IN KIND.


  "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
   ST. PAUL TO THE GALATIANS.

  "Ye shall know them by their fruits: Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles?"  ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL.

It was fitting that one of the most characteristic and beautiful
laws of life should be announced in the opening chapter of the
Holy Bible. It was clothed in the form of an ordinance, as became
it: "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,
and every thing that creepeth upon the earth, after his kind."
From that day to this, every living thing--beast, bird and insect,
tree, shrub and plant--has produced after its kind. It is a law
that runs through all animal and vegetable life. Each family in
the great world of living forms was created for a special purpose,
and was intended to remain pure and distinctive until the
termination of its mission. Whenever the family boundaries are
overstepped, the curse of nature is breathed upon the generative
functions, and the illegitimate product dies out, or subsides into
hopeless degeneration. The mule is a monster, and has no progeny.

A plant, or a tree, never forgets itself. Cheat it of its root,
and the stem remains faithful. The minutest twig, put out to nurse
upon the arm of a foreign mother, feels the thrill of the great
primal law in its filmiest fibre, and breathes in every expression
of its life its fidelity. If you will walk with me into the
garden, I will show you a mountain-ash in full bloom; but on the
top of it you will see a strange little cluster of pear-blossoms.
A twig from a Seckel pear-tree was, two or three years since,
engrafted there. It had a hard time in uniting its being to that
of the alien ash, but it loved life, and so, at length, it
consented to join itself to the transplanted forest tree. It was
weak and alone, but it kept its law. Spring bathed the ash with
its own peculiar bloom, and autumn hung it with its clusters of
scarlet berries, and it was hidden from sight by the redundant
foliage, but it kept its law. The roots of the mountain-ash,
blindly reaching in the ground and imbibing its juices, knew
nothing of the little orphaned twig above, that waited for its
food; but they could not cheat it of its law. Up to a certain
point of a certain bough the rising fluids came under the law of
the mountain-ash, and there they found a gateway, guarded by an
angel that gave them a new commandment. "Thus far--mountain-ash:
beyond--Seckel pear;" and if, in October, you will walk in the
garden again with me, I will show you among the scarlet berries,
bending heavily toward you, the clustered succulence of the
Seckel.

A seedsman may cheat you, but a seed never does. If you plant
corn, it never comes up potatoes. If you sow wheat, it never comes
up rye. Wrapped up in every capsule, bound up in every kernel,
packed into every minutest germ, is this law, written by God at
the beginning, "Produce thou after thy kind." So the whole living
world goes on producing after its kind. Year after year we visit
the seedsman, and read the labels on his drawers and packages, and
bear home and plant in our gardens the little homely germs that
keep God's law so well; and summer rewards our trust in them with
beautiful flowers, and autumn with bountiful fruition. Robins sang
the same song to the Pilgrim Fathers that they sing to us. The
may-flower breathes the same fragrance now that it breathed in the
fingers of Rose Standish; and man and woman, producing after their
kind, are the same to-day that they were three thousand years ago.

Now there is a significance in all the laws of material life,
above and beyond their special office. They do the work they were
set to do; they rule the life they were appointed to rule; but the
laws, themselves, belong to a family whose branches run through
all intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. Laws live in groups
no less uniformly than the existences which they inform and
govern. It is a law, both of animal and vegetable structures, that
they shall grow by what they feed on; but this law passes the
bounds of matter, and finds its widest meaning and its most
extended application beyond. The mind grows by what it feeds on;
the heart grows by what it feeds on; love, hate, jealousy,
revenge, fortitude, courage, grow by what they feed on;
spirituality grows by what spirituality feeds on. Wherever growth
goes, through all the realm of God, this law goes; and the law
that every thing that produces shall produce after its kind, is
just as universal as this. It begins in material life, and runs up
through all life. Rather, perhaps, I should say, that it begins in
spiritual life, and seeks embodiment in material life, so that we
may apprehend it. The clouds were in heaven before there was any
rain, and the rain comes down from heaven to tell us what the
clouds are made of. I might go further, and say that every form,
of matter is but the embodiment of a divine thought, and that,
with that thought, there passes into matter the laws that reside
in divine things of corresponding nature and office.

But I am becoming abstruse--quite too much so, considering the
simple, practical truths to which I am seeking to introduce my
reader. I have been thinking how, in accordance with this law of
which we are talking, our moods, our passions, our sympathies, our
moral frames and conditions, reproduce themselves, after their
kind, in the minds and lives around us. I call my child to my knee
in anger; I strike him a hasty blow that carries with it the
peculiar sting of anger; I speak a loud reproof that bears with it
the spirit of anger; and I look in vain for any relenting in his
flashing eyes, flushed face, and compressed lips. I have made my
child angry, and my uncontrolled passion has produced after its
kind. I have sown anger, and I have reaped anger instantaneously.
Perhaps I become still more angry, in consequence of the passion
manifested by my child, and I speak and strike again. He is weak
and I am strong; but, though he bow his head, crushed into
silence, I may be sure that there is a sullen heart in the little
bosom, and anger the more bitter because it is impotent. I put the
child away from me, and think of what I have done. I am full of
relentings. I long to ask his pardon, for I know that I have
offended and deeply injured one of Christ's little ones. I call
him to me again, press his head to my breast, kiss him, and weep.
No word is spoken, but the little bosom heaves, the little heart
softens, the little eyes grow tenderly penitent, the little hands
come up and clasp my neck, and my relentings and my sorrow have
produced after their kind. The child is conquered, and so am I.

If I utter fretful words, they come back to me like echoes. If I
bristle all over with irritability, the quills will begin to rise
all about me. One thoroughly irritable person in a breakfast-room
spoils coffee and toast, sours milk, and destroys appetite for a
whole family. He produces after his kind.

Generally, a man has around him those who are like him. If he be a
man of strong nature and positive qualities, he will plant his
moods and grow them in the natures next to him. Of course there
must be exceptions to this rule, because the will is free and man
is reasonable, and the motive and power to pluck up unwelcome
seed, and unpleasant growths, inheres in all men. I have known a
good-natured man to live with a pettish, ill-natured, jealous,
fault-finding wife through all the years of my acquaintance with
him, he meantime growing no worse, and she growing no better. They
had voluntarily and effectually shut themselves each from the
influence of the other. He had closed his spirit against that
which was bad in her, and she had closed her spirit against that
which was good in him; so she went on fretting through life, and
he very good-naturedly laughing at her. We see this thing through
all society. We see innocent girls grow up into virtue, though
surrounded on every side by vicious example. We see natures and
characters everywhere which refuse to receive the seed that falls
upon them from the natures and characters of others; but this
makes nothing against the universality of the law we are
considering. Generally, I repeat, a man has around him those who
are like him. The soil of a social circle is usually open, and
whatever falls into it produces after its kind, whether it be good
nature or ill nature, purity or impurity, faith or skepticism,
love or hate.

It would appear, therefore, that there is no way by which we can
surround ourselves by good society so readily as by being good
ourselves. If we plant good seed, we may calculate with a great
degree of certainty upon securing good fruit. If I plant frankness
and open-heartedness, I expect to reap them; and I have no right
to expect to reap them unless I plant them. If I go to a man with
my heart in my hand, I have good reason for expecting to meet a
man with his heart in his hand. Frankness begets frankness, just
as naturally and just as certainly, under the proper conditions,
as like produces like in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. There
are men who do every thing by indirection who meet one as warily
as if words were traps; and pitfalls who manage a friendly
interview as a general would manage a campaign; and if they make
their demonstration first, we are placed upon our guard. We
unconsciously become wary and distrustful. They plant distrust and
secretiveness, and they produce in us after their kind. No man can
be treated frankly in this world unless he himself be frank. If we
would win confidence to ourselves, we must put confidence in
others. The soul is like a mirror, reflecting that which stands
before it.

The young naturally take on the moods and accept and reflect the
influences around them more readily than the old, just as a new
piece of land will produce a better crop than one which is worn or
pre-occupied. A virgin mind is like a virgin soil. It contains all
the elements of fertility, and is adapted to the production of any
crop. It has been exhausted in no department of its constitution.
It is not occupied by roots, and shaded by foliage. It is not
turf-bound and dry; but it is soft and open, and clean and moist,
and ready for the reception of any seed that may fall upon it.
Until age brings individuality, the mind seems to have little
choice as to what it will receive. Then, indeed, it does reject
much seed that falls upon it, and much fails to take root because
of the pre-occupation of the surface. A sensual seed is planted in
the soul of a young man, and it springs up readily, and produces
after its kind; but the same seed tossed upon an older soil fails
to sink and germinate, because the surface is pre-occupied, or,
more frequently, because that peculiar element on which the germ
must rely for quickening and sustentation has been exhausted. Some
manly or Christian grace falls upon a young mind, and quickly
strikes root and rises into flower and fruit; while the same grace
thrown upon an adult mind would fail to reach the soil, through
the vices that cumber and choke it. It is thus that home and the
school-room are literally seminaries--places where seed is sown--
and it is in these that we expect and intend that every seed shall
produce after its kind. Let us talk about this a little.

I once heard a person say that one of his acquaintances, whom he
named, had no moral right to have a child. Why was this harsh
judgment uttered? Because he was hereditarily scrofulous, and
would necessarily entail upon his offspring the family taint. If
there were even a show of justice in this, what must be said of a
parent who does not possess a single moral quality, that even he,
in the selfishness of his parental love, would desire to see
implanted in his child? How many homes are scattered over
Christendom in which no good seed is sown! How many selfish,
niggardly, vicious parents are there, who, producing after their
kind, by generation and by influence, are filling the world with
selfish, niggardly, and vicious children! How many homes are there
in which the gentle words of love are never heard; in which the
tender graces of a Christian heart are never unfolded; in which a
prayer is never uttered! How many fathers are there whose lips are
black with profanity and foul with obscenity, and whose lives are
mean and unwholesome! How many mothers are there whose tongues are
nimble with scandal and bitter with scolding, and whose brains are
busy with vanities and jealousies! Ah! if there be any man or
woman in this world who has no moral right to have a child, it is
one who has not a single trait of character desirable to be
reproduced in a child. Scrofula may be bad, but sin is worse.
Bodily taint may be terrible, but spiritual taint is horrible.

It is a general truth, under the law that every thing produces
after its kind, that children become what their parents are. A
simple people, virtuous and healthy, will produce virtuous,
healthy, and true-hearted children, A luxurious people--lazy,
sensual, wasteful--will produce children like themselves. If we go
through the vicious quarters of a great city, where licentiousness
and drunkenness and beastly vices prevail, we shall find that
though all die before old age, the communities are abundantly
recruited by the children which they produce. Men, principles,
habits, ideas, vices, all have children, whose features betray
their parentage; so that no parent has a right to expect a child
to be better than its father and mother. On the contrary, he has
every reason to believe that every thing that a child sees wrong
in the parents, will be imitated. There is no way by which bad
parents can bring up a family well. There must be in the parental
life good principles, a sweet and equable temper, a tender and
loving disposition, a firm self-control, a pleasant deportment,
and a conscientious devotion to duty, or these will not be found
in the life of the children. Bad seed, sown in the quick soil of a
child's mind, is sure to spring up, and to bear fruit after its
kind. No sensible man ever dreams of gathering figs from thistles,
or grapes from bramble-bushes, and no man has the slightest right
to suppose that he can bring up a family to be better than he is.
The plant will be true to the seed.

We are in the habit of hearing that the children of a certain
neighborhood, or school, or town, are extraordinarily bad
children. Great wonder is sometimes expressed in regard to such
instances, when, really, they are not wonderful at all. When
children are unusually bad, parents are unusually bad, or, if they
are not bad-hearted, they are wrong-headed. I ought, perhaps, to
say here that I have known an irascible, tyrannical, unjust and
cruel school-teacher to spoil a neighborhood of children, when the
parents were without any special fault, save that of failing to
thrust him out of the charge which he had abused. But usually the
fault is at home. If the seed planted there be good, it will
produce good fruit. Yet my reader will say that the best man he
ever knew, had the worst children he ever saw. The truth of the
statement is admitted, but what do you know of the home life of
that family? How much unreasonable restraint has been exercised
upon those children? From how many exhibitions of stern and
unrelenting injustice have these children suffered? What laxity of
discipline and carelessness of culture have reigned in that
family? I know many who seem to be excellent men in society, but
who are any thing but amiable men at home. In one they are
pleasant, affable, kind, and charitable; in the other, cross-grained,
hard, unkind, and unjust. I declare with all positiveness, that when
a family or a neighborhood of children is bad, there is a reason for it
outside of the children. There are bad influences which descend
upon them, and work out their natural results in them.

It is astonishing to see how long a seed will lie in the ground
without germinating, and how true it will remain to its kind
through untold years. Cut down a pine forest, where an oak has not
been seen for a century, and oak shrubbery will spring up. Heave
out upon the surface a pile of earth that has lain hidden from the
eyes of a dozen generations, and forthwith it will grow green with
weeds. Plough up the prairie, and turn under the grass and flowers
that have grown there since the white settler can remember, and
there will spring from the inverted sod a strange growth that has
had no representative in the sunlight for long ages. Soul and soil
are alike in this. I once heard a man say of his father, who had
been dead many years--"I hate him: I hate his memory." The words
were spoken bitterly, with a flushed face and angry eyes, yet he
who spoke them was one of the kindest and most placable of men.
Deep down in his heart, under love for his mother which was almost
worship, and under affection for wife, children, and sisters which
was as deep as his nature, and under multiplied friendships, there
had been planted this seed. The father had treated the boy harshly
and unjustly; and the young soul was stung as the tender fruit is
stung by an insect. Where anger and resentment were sown, anger
and resentment were ready to spring up the moment the seed was
uncovered. I have known men to carry through life a revenge
planted in their hearts by some unjust and cruel schoolmaster. How
many men are there are in the world who have sworn to revenge
themselves upon one who had stung them with anger or injustice
when in childhood!

So we come to the grand lesson, that if we would have good
children, we must ourselves be exactly what we would have them
become; if we would govern our families, we must first govern
ourselves; if we would have only pleasant words greet our ears in
the home circle, we must speak only pleasant words. We should see
to it that we plant nothing, the legitimate fruits of which we
shall not be willing and glad to see borne in the lives of our
children. If our children are bad, the fault is, ninety-nine cases
in a hundred, our own, in some way. If we would reform society, or
make it better in any respect, our quickest way to do it is to
reform and make ourselves better. If I would reap courtesy and
hospitality and kindness and love, I must plant them; and it is
the sum of all arrogance to assume that I have a right to reap
them without planting them. A man who receives courtesy without
exercising it, reaps that which he has not sown. He is a thief,
and ought in justice to be kicked out of society. Blessings on the
man who sows the seeds of a happy nature and a noble character
broadcast wherever his feet wander,--who has a smile alike for joy
and sorrow, a tender word always for a child, a compassionate
utterance for suffering, courtesy for friends and for strangers,
encouragement for the despairing, an open heart for all--love for
all--good words for all! Such seed produces after its kind in all
soils, when it finds lodgment; and that which the sower fails to
reap, passes into hands that are grateful for the largess.




LESSON V.

TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS.


  "For truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as
a sunbeam." MILTON.

  "Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?" MATTHEW PRIOR.

  "Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like
   A star new-born that drops into its place,
   And which, once circling in its placid round,
   Not all the tumult of the earth can shake." LOWELL.

One of the rarest powers possessed by man is the power to state a
fact. It seems a very simple thing to tell the truth, but, beyond
all question, there is nothing half so easy as lying. To
comprehend a fact in its exact length, breadth, relations, and
significance, and to state it in language that shall represent it
with exact fidelity, are the work of a mind singularly gifted,
finely balanced, and thoroughly practiced in that special
department of effort. The greatness of Daniel Webster was more
apparent in his power to state a fact, or to present a truth,
than in any other characteristic of his gigantic nature. It was
the power of truth that won for him his forensic victories.
Whenever he was truest to truth, then was truth truest to him. He
was a man who implicitly believed in the power of truth to take
care of itself when it had been fairly presented; and the failures
of his life always grew out of his attempts to make falsehood look
like truth--a field of effort in which the most gifted of his
cotemporaries won the most brilliant of his triumphs.

The men are comparatively few who are in the habit of telling the
truth. We all lie, every day of our lives--almost in every
sentence we utter--not consciously and criminally, perhaps, but
really, in that our language fails to represent truth, and state
facts correctly. Our truths are half-truths, or distorted truths,
or exaggerated truths, or sophisticated truths. Much of this is
owing to carelessness, much to habit, and, more than has generally
been supposed, to mental incapacity. I have known eminent men who
had not the power to state a fact, in its whole volume and
outline, because, first, they could not comprehend it perfectly,
and, second, because their power of expression was limited. The
lenses by which they apprehended their facts were not adjusted
properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines,
cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice
measurement of relations, were matters outside of their
observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling;
and their language was no better than their apprehensions--usually
it was worse, because language is rarely as definite as
apprehension. Men rarely do their work to suit them, because their
tools are imperfect.

There are men in all communities who are believed to be honest,
yet whose word is never taken as authority upon any subject. There
is a flaw or a warp somewhere in their perceptions, which prevents
them from receiving truthful impressions. Every thing comes to
them distorted, as natural objects are distorted by reaching the
eye through wrinkled window-glass. Some are able to apprehend a
fact and state it correctly, if it have no direct relation to
themselves; but the moment their personality, or their personal
interest, is involved, the fact assumes false proportions and
false colors. I know a physician whose patients are always
alarmingly sick when he is first called to them. As they usually
get well, I am bound to believe that he is a good physician; but I
am not bound to believe that they are all as sick at beginning as
he supposes them to be. The first violent symptoms operate upon
his imagination and excite his fears, and his opinion as to the
degree of danger attaching to the diseases of his patients is not
worth half so much as that of any sensible old nurse. In fact,
nobody thinks of taking it all; and those who know him, and who
hear his sad representations of the condition of his patients,
show equal distrust of his word and faith in his skill, by taking
it for granted that they are in a fair way to get well.

It is impossible for bigots, for men of one idea, for fanatics,
for those who set boundaries to themselves in religious, social,
and political creeds, for men who think more of their own selfish
interests than they do of truth, and for vicious men, to speak the
truth. We are all, I suppose, bigots to a greater or less extent.
We all have a creed written in our minds, or printed in our books;
and to this we are more or less blindly attached. We set down an
article of faith, or adopt an opinion, and nothing is allowed to
interfere with it. If a sturdy fact comes along, and asks
admission, we turn to our creed to see if we can safely entertain
it. If the creed says "No," we say "No," and the fact is turned
out of doors, and misrepresented after it is gone. Our creeds are
our dwellings. They come next to us, and nothing can come to us,
or go out from us, without going through our creeds. The simple
fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross, reaching the
mind through various creeds, and passing out again, goes through
as many phases as there are creeds, ranging through a scale which
at one extreme presents a God dying to redeem the lost millions of
a world, and, at the other, a benevolent, sweet-tempered man,
yielding his life in testimony of the honesty of his teachings.

No new truth presents itself, which does not have to run the
gauntlet of our creeds. If it get through alive, and seem disposed
to be peaceable, and to remain subordinate to them, then we let it
live, and receive it into respectable society;--otherwise, we
entreat it shamefully. Sometimes the truth is too much for us, and
asserts its power to stand without our help, and then we
compromise with it. The world will turn on its axis, and wheel
around its orbit, though we stop the mouth of the profane wretch
who declares it; so, after a while, we get tired of fighting the
fact, and shape our creeds accordingly. We fight the sturdy truths
of geology, because they interfere with our creeds, but after
awhile the sturdy truths of geology become too sturdy for us, and
then we begin to patronize them, and to confer upon them the honor
of harmonizing with our creeds. A man who has adopted the creed of
a materialist, is entirely incompetent to receive, entertain, and
represent a spiritual fact. My creed is the window at which I sit,
and look at all the world of truth outside of me. All truth is
tinted by the medium through which it passes to reach my mind; and
such is my imperfection and my weakness, that I could not raise my
window immediately, and place my soul in direct, vital contact
with the great atmosphere of truth, if I would.

But if bigotry be such a bar to the correct perception of truth,
what shall be said of self-interest and personal vices of appetite
and passion? It is possible for no man who owns a slave and finds
profit in such ownership, to receive the truth touching the right
of man to himself, and the moral wrong of slavery. We have too
much evidence that even creeds must bend to self-interest, and
that any traffic will be regarded as morally right which is
pecuniarily profitable. Once, in the creed of the slaveholders,
slavery was admitted to be wrong, but that was when it was looked
upon as temporary in its character, and, on the whole, evil in its
results to all concerned. Now, when it is sought to be made a
permanent institution, because it seems to be the only source of
the wealth of a section, it has become right; and even the
slave-trade logically falls into the category of laudable and
legitimate commerce. It is impossible for a people who have allowed
pecuniary interest to deprave their moral sense to this extent,
to perceive and receive any sound political truth, or to apprehend
the spirit and temper of those who are opposed to them. The same
may be said of the liquor traffic. The act of selling liquor is
looked upon with horror by those who stand outside, and who have
an eye upon its consequences; but the seller deems it legitimate,
and looks upon any interference with his sales as an infringement
of his rights. Our selfish interest in any business, or in any
scheme of profit, distorts all truth either directly or indirectly
related to such business or scheme, or living in its region and
atmosphere. The President of the United States, or the governor of
the commonwealth, may be an excellent man; but if I want an
office, and he fails to appoint me to it, why I don't exactly
regard him as such. He becomes to me a very ordinary and vulgar
sort of man indeed; but if he give me my office, then, though he
may be all that his enemies think him, he seems to me to be
invested with a singular nobility of character that other people
do not apprehend at all.

The vices of humanity are sad media through which to receive
truth--often so opaque that no truth can reach the mind at all. It
is impossible for a man whose affections are bestialized, whose
practices are libertine, and whose imaginations are all impure, to
receive the truth that there are such things as purity and virtue,
and that there are men and women around him who are virtuous and
pure. There is no truth which personal vice will not distort. The
approaches to a sensual mind are through the senses, and the same
may be said of all minds in a general way; but the approaches to a
sensual mind are only through the senses, and they, being
perverted, abused, exhausted, or unduly excited, furnish the
utterly unreliable avenues by which truth reaches the soul. The
grand reason why truth, published from the pulpit and the
platform, revealed in periodicals and books, and embodied in
pictures and statues, works no greater changes upon the minds and
morals of men, is, that it never gets inside of men in the shape
in which it is uttered. It passes through such media of bigotry,
or self-interest, or vice, that its identity and power are lost.

It is not, therefore, remarkable that so little truth is told
when so little is received--that so little is expressed when so
little is apprehended. The largest field will not produce an
oat-straw that will stand alone, if there be no silica in the soil,
and the largest mind cannot express a pure truth if it has lived
always so encased that pure truth could not find its way into it.
All truth reaches our minds through various media, by which it is
more or less colored and refracted; and it is very rare that a man
has the power to embody in language and utter a truth in the
degree of perfection in which he received it. As I said at
beginning, the power to state a fact correctly, or to express a
pure truth, is among the rarest gifts of man. It never struck me
that David was remarkably hasty, when he said that all men were
liars. All men are liars, in one respect or another. They are
divisible into various classes, which may legitimately be
mentioned under two heads, viz., unconscious liars and conscious
liars.

Of those who lie, and suppose they are telling the truth, I have
already spoken. They are a large and most respectable class of
people, and their apology must be found in the theory I have
advanced; yet among these may be found men and women who will
require all the amplitude of our mantles of charity to cover them.
I have been much impressed with a passage in Dr. Bushnell's recent
volume, entitled "Christian Nurture," which incidentally touches
upon this subject, in the writer's characteristically powerful
way; and as I cannot condense it, I will copy it:

"There is, in some persons who appear in all other respects to be
Christian, a strange defect of truth, or truthfulness. They are
not conscious of it. They would take it as a cruel injustice were
they only to suspect their acquaintances of holding such an
estimate of them. And yet, there is a want of truth in every sort
of demonstration they make. It is not their words only that lie,
but their voice, air, action; their every putting forth has a
lying character. The atmosphere they live in is an atmosphere of
pretence. Their virtues are affectations. Their compassions and
sympathies are the airs they put on. Their friendship is their
mood, and nothing more; and yet they do not know it. They mean, it
may be, no fraud. They only cheat themselves so effectually as to
believe that what they are only acting is their truth. And, what
is difficult to reconcile, they have a great many Christian
sentiments; they maintain prayer as a habit, and will sometimes
speak intelligently of matters of Christian experience."

It was the oracular sage, Deacon Bedott, who, in view of the
imperfections of his kind, remarked several times in his life:
"we are all poor creeturs"--a remark that comes as near to being
pure truth as any we meet with outside of the Bible and the
standard treatises on mathematics. We are, indeed, poor creatures.
Our highest conceptions of truth are contemptible, our best
utterances fall short of our conceptions, and our lives are poorer
than our language.

Of all conscious and criminal lying, I know of none that exceeds
in malignity and magnitude that of a political campaign. In such a
struggle, men get in love with lies. They seek apologies for the
circulation of lies. They hug lies to their hearts in preference
to truth. It is the habit of hopeful philosophers to enlarge upon
the benefit to our people of the annual and quadrennial contests
for place, which occur in our country, as if principles were the
things really at stake, and personalities were out of the
question, as the lying politicians would have us believe. What, in
honesty, can be said of the leading speakers and the leading
presses which sustain a party in a contest for power, but that
they studiously misrepresent their opponents, misstate their own
motives, give currency to false accusations, suppress truth that
tells against them, exaggerate the importance of that which favors
them, seize upon all plausible pretexts for fraud, skulk behind
subterfuges, and lie outright when it is deemed necessary. And
what can be expected more and better than this, when the leaders
are office-seekers, who live and thrive on the grand basilar lie
that the motive which inspires all their action is a regard for
the popular good? Of course I speak generally. There are
politicians and presses that are above personal considerations;
but even these become infected with the prevalent poison of
falsehood that is everywhere associated with their efforts.

The social lying of the world has found multitudinous satirists,
and furnished the staple of a whole school of writers. We touch
our hats in token of respect to men whom in our hearts we despise.
We inquire tenderly for the health of persons for whom we do not
care a straw. We who cannot afford it wear expensive clothing, and
display grand equipage, and give costly entertainments, not
because we enjoy it, but because we wish to impress upon the world
the belief that we can afford it. It is our way of expressing a
lie which seems to us important to the maintenance of our social
standing. We receive with a kiss a visitor whom we wish were in
Greenland, and betray her to the next who comes in. We pretend to
ourselves and our neighbors that there is nothing which we so much
esteem as the simple friendships of life, and the straight-forward
love and hearty good will of the honest hearts around us, yet when
the rich and the titled are near, we are gladdened and flattered,
and look with supercilious contempt upon the humble friendships
which we affected to cherish supremely. In our conscience and
judgment, we appreciate the genuine values of social life, and we
profess in our language to hold them in just estimation, but in
our life and practice we honor that which is fictitious and
conventional, apprehending in our conscience and judgment that we
are acting a lie. Socially I cannot but believe that there is far
more of truthfulness in humble than in high life. The more nearly
we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from, the
artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth
is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial
wall that rises above it, nor the buckets that go up and down as
caprice or selfishness turns the windlass.

Business lying is, after all, the most universal of any. It is
confined to no age and no nation. Solomon understood the world's
great game when he wrote: "It is naught, it is naught, saith the
buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth;" and from
Solomon's day down to ours, buyers have depreciated that which
they would purchase, and then boasted of their bargains. When two
selfish persons meet on opposite sides of a counter, there rises
between them a sort of antagonism. One is interested in selling an
article of merchandise at the highest practicable profit, and the
other is interested in obtaining it at the lowest possible price.
Of the small, cunning lies that pass back and forth over that
counter, of the half-truths told, and the whole truths suppressed,
of deceptions touching the quality of goods on one side and the
ability to buy on the other, it would be humiliating to tell. If
every lie told in the shops, across mahogany and show-case, by
buyers and sellers, were nailed like base coin to the counter,
there would be no room for the display of goods. It is considered
no mean compliment to a business man to say that he is sharp at a
bargain; yet this sharpness is rarely more than the faculty of
ingenious lying. A man who sells to me an article worth only five
dollars for twice that sum is a "sharp man;" but he cannot make
such a sale to me without telling me, in some way, a lie. The
price he puts upon his merchandise is a lie, essentially, in
itself.

There is a great deal of business lying that by long habit becomes
unconscious. If we take up a newspaper, we shall find that quite a
number of the stores around us, kept by our excellent friends,
have "the largest and finest stock of goods ever displayed in the
city." We shall find that they have been selling for years at
"unprecedentedly low prices," that they are "selling at less than
cost," that they are pushing off goods at rates "ruinously low,"
and that they can offer bargains to buyers that will confound
their competitors. I suppose that none of these advertisers think
they are lying, or, if they do, that their lying is of a harmful
character. Lying in this way is supposed to be part of the
legitimate machinery of trade. Promising definitely to finish work
without the expectation of keeping the promise, or being able to
keep it, is another kind of half unconscious lying. There are men
engaged in various trades, in all communities, whose word is of no
more value, when in the form of a promise to finish within a
certain period a certain piece of work, than the fly-leaf of a
last year's almanac. There are men whom every one knows who will
lie without blushing about their work, and who will stand at their
counter and lie all day, and then sleep with a peaceful conscience
at night, having failed to fulfil a single pledge during their
waking hours. Then there are people who will promise to pay bills,
and promise a hundred times over, and never pay, and never expect
to pay. When a bill is presented, they promise to pay, as a matter
of course; and that is considered as good as the gold, until it is
presented again; and then comes another promise, and another and
another. The creditor knows the debtor lies, but many a debtor of
this kind would feel insulted and injured by any spoken doubts of
his truthfulness.

But the field is large, and I am already beyond the limits which I
set for myself in these essays. It will be seen that I regard
truthfulness as, on the whole, a rare article in this world. It
is in some respects necessarily so. Many men are incapable of
stating a fact or telling a truth. They have not the power to
comprehend or express either. The majority of men receive truth
through such media of prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, sensuality,
and the like, that they never get it pure, and are therefore
incapable of uttering it correctly, even when their power of
expression equals their power of perception, which is not commonly
the case. So there is a world of unconscious lying; but I am sorry
to believe that there is just as large a world of conscious lying.
In politics, society, and business, the conscious and intentional
lie abounds. "Lord! how this world is given to lying!"

Well, all this can be improved. Men can cultivate the power to
apprehend and express truth. They can cast off the prejudice,
selfishness, bigotry, and sensuality that prevent them from
receiving truth. They can refrain from conscious lying; and no one
doubts that the world would be greatly improved by honest efforts
directed to these ends. Only the naked soul, in Eternity's white
light, can be wholly truthful; but we can all try for it, and we
shall find our highest account in trying.




LESSON VI.

MISTAKES OF PENANCE.


  "For of the soul the body form doth take,
   For soul is form and doth the body make."
   SPENSER.

  "Can sackcloth clothe a fault or hide a shame?
   Or do thy hands make Heaven a recompense,
   By strewing dust upon thy briny face?
   No! though thou pine thyself with willing want,
   Or face look thin, or carcass ne'er so gaunt;
   Such holy madness God rejects and loathes
   That sinks no deeper than the skin or clothes."
   QUARLES.

  "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." KEATS.

I have every reason to believe that God loves Shakers, but I do
not think He admires them. I do not see how He can; but perhaps
this is not a competent reason to offer in the premises. I saw a
wagon-load of what I supposed to be Shakers of both sexes, riding
along the street, the other day; and I wondered what I should
think of them if I had made them. I think I should have been
about equally vexed and amused to see the lines that I had made
beautiful, disguised, and every grace-giving swell of limb and
bust, upon which I had exercised such exquisite toil, carefully
hidden. They sat up very straight and prim, in a very square
wagon, behind a square-trotting horse, driven by "right lines" in
a pair of hands that seemed to grow out of the driver's stomach,
while his elevated, rectangular elbows cut rigidly against the air
on either side. It was a vision for a painter--a house painter--
"a painter by trade." The long-haired, meek-looking men,
with their flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, straight coats and
neutral colors, and the women with their sugar-scoop bonnets,
white kerchiefs and straight waists, looked like a case of faded
wax-figures, in prison uniform, that had "come down to us from a
former generation."

I heaved a sigh as the wagon-load of mortified and badly-dressed
flesh passed out of sight, and wondered if the souls inside of
those bodies were as angular as their covering. I did not believe
it--I do not believe it. I have no doubt that underneath those
straight waistcoats hearts have throbbed at the sight of woman and
child, and longed for home and family life, with yearnings that
could not be uttered. Those straightlaced sensibilities have been
thrilled by beauty, and bathed in the grace and glory of the life
around them. Trees have whispered to them, flowers have looked up
and rebuked them, brooks have called to them with laughter, rivers
have smiled upon them in sunshine, the great sky has bent over
them with infinite tenderness and fulness of beauty, and they have
felt what they could not define. It was something very wrong, they
supposed, and so they buttoned their straight jackets around them,
turned their eyes away from beholding vanity, and thought they had
done an excellent thing. I know that those young women, with their
abominable clothing outside, and their crushed and abused
sympathies inside, are unhappy, unless they have all been
mercifully transformed into fanatics. It is useless to tell me
that a man can ignore or trample to death the strongest passion of
his nature--the strongest, the purest, and the most ennobling--and
be a happy man. It is useless to say that a man or woman can walk
through a world of beauty--themselves the most beautiful of all
things--and bind themselves up in unbecoming drapery, and smother
all their impulses to express the beauty with which God inspires
them, and do it with content and satisfaction. It cannot be done.

So, when this wagon-load of Shakers drove out of sight, I heaved a
sigh, for I knew that not to be unhappy in the life which was
typefied in their dress and establishment, would be a greater
misfortune, essentially, than dissatisfaction and discontent would
be. If they were happy in their life, they must have become
perverted in their natures, or indurated beyond the susceptibility
to receive the impressions of healthy men and women. If God ever
put any thing majestic and noble into a man, and gave him a
fitting frame for it, He never intended that it should be hidden
in a meal-bag, or permanently quenched under a smock-frock. In the
infinite variety which he has introduced into human character and
into human forms and faces, there is no warrant for dressing men
in uniform, but a most emphatic protest against it. If God made
woman beautiful, He made her so to be looked at--to give pleasure
to the eyes which rest upon her--and she has no business to dress
herself as if she were a hitching-post, or to transform that which
should give delight to those among whom she moves, into a
ludicrous caricature of a woman's form.

I repeat that I have every reason to believe that God loves
Shakers, but I do not think He admires them. If God admires the
bodies He has made, He cannot admire them when they are covered by
the Shaker dress, for it spoils the looks of them, and differs
essentially from the plan which He pursues in draping all other
forms of life. There is no grace about it, and no beauty of color.
God admires clouds, I doubt not, when painted by the setting sun,
and stars flashing in the heavens, and the flowers of myriad hues
that are scattered over the earth, but if these are objects of His
special admiration, as they are of ours, what can He think of a
drab Shaker bonnet? What can He think when man and woman, the
glory and crown of His creation, are entirely overtopped and
thrown into the shade by birds and bees and blossoms, and go
poking around the world in unexampled and ingeniously contrived
ugliness? What does He think of men and women who take that
passion of love, which was intended to make them happy, and give
them sweet companionship, and bear young children to their arms,
and trample it under their feet as an unholy thing, and to welcome
to their hearts, in its stead, blackness, and darkness, and
tempest? What does He think of lives out of which are shut all
meaning and all individuality, and all love and expression of
beauty, and all vivifying, liberalizing, and humanizing
experience?

I owe no grudge to the Shakers. I like their apple sauce, (they
ask a thrifty price for it,) and have faith in the genuineness and
the generation, under favorable conditions, of their garden seeds;
but I object to their style of life and piety, and to every thing
outside of Shakerdom which looks like it. I object to this whole
idea, (and the Shakers have not monopolized it,) that God takes
delight in the voluntary personal mortification of His children,
and that He approves of their going about, sad-faced and
straight-laced, studiously avoiding all temptation to enjoy
themselves.

I have seen a deacon in the pride of his deep humility. He combed
his hair straight, and looked studiously after the main chance;
and while he looked, he employed himself in setting a good
example. His dress was rigidly plain, and his wife was not
indulged in the vanities of millinery and mantua-making. He never
joked. He did not know what a joke was, any further than to know
that it was a sin. He carried a Sunday face through the week. He
did not mingle in the happy social parties of his neighborhood. He
was a deacon. He starved his social nature because he was a
deacon. He refrained from all participation in a free and generous
life because he was a deacon. He made his children hate Sunday
because he was a deacon. He so brought them up that they learned
to consider themselves unfortunate in being the children of a
deacon. They were pitied by other children because they were the
children of a deacon. His wife was pitied by other women because
she was the wife of a deacon. Nobody loved him. If he came into a
circle where men were laughing or telling stories, they always
stopped until he went out. Nobody ever grasped his hand cordially,
or slapped him on the shoulder, or spoke of him as a good fellow.
He seemed as dry and hard and tough as a piece of jerked beef.
There was no softness of character--no juiciness--no loveliness
in him.

Now it is of no use for me to undertake to realize to myself that
God admires such a character as this. I do not doubt that He loves
the man, as He loves all men; but to admire his style of manhood
and piety is impossible for any intelligent being. It lacks the
roundness and fulness, and richness and sweetness, that belong to
a truly admirable character. Such a man caricatures Christianity,
and scares other men away from it. Such a man ostentatiously
presents himself as one in whose life religion is dominant. It is
religion that is supposed to rub down that long face, and inspire
that stiff demeanor, and to make him at all points an unattractive
and unlovable man. Of course it is not religion that does any
thing of the kind, but it has the credit of it with the world, and
the world does not like it. It looks around, and sees a great many
men who do not pretend to religion at all, and yet who are very
lovable men. If religion can transform a pleasant man into a most
unpleasant one, and change a free, bright, and happy home into a
dismal place of slavery, and blot out a man's aesthetic and social
nature, the world naturally thinks that getting religion would be
almost as much of a misfortune as getting some melancholy chronic
disease, and I do not blame it. It is not to be wondered at that
the world should mistake, very much, the true nature of
Christianity, when Christians themselves entertain such grievous
errors about it.

I suppose God is attracted to very much the same style of
character that men are. Christ loved a young man at first sight,
who lacked the very thing essential to his highest manhood. But
He loved the kind of man He saw before Him. He was upright,
frank-hearted, open-minded, and bright; and "Jesus beholding him,
loved him." There are men whom one cannot help loving and admiring
though they lack a great many things--things very "needful" to
make them perfect men. Now I put it to good, conscientious,
Christian men and women, whether they do not take more pleasure in
the society of a warm-hearted, generous, chivalrous, well-fed, man
of the world, than in the society of any of that class of
Christians of whom the deacon I have mentioned is a type. I know
they do, and they cannot help it. There is more of that which
belongs to a first-class Christian character in the former than in
the latter, and if I were called upon to test the two men by
commanding them respectively to sell what they have and give to
the poor, I should be disappointed were the deacon to behave the
best. A character which religion does not fructify--does not
soften, enlarge, beautify, and enrich--is not benefited by
religion--or, rather, has not possessed itself of religion. God
loves that which is beautiful and attractive in character, just as
much as we do, and it makes no difference where he sees it. He
does not dislike the amiable traits of a sinner because he is a
sinner, nor does he admire those traits of a Christian which we
feel to be contemptible, simply because they belong to a
Christian. A Christian sucked dry of his humanity, is as juiceless
and as flavorless as a sucked orange, and I believe that God
regards him in the same light that we do. He will save such I
doubt not, for their faith; and, in the coming world, they will
learn what they do not know here; but the question whether they
are as well worth saving as some of their neighbors, may, I think,
be legitimately entertained. In saying this, I mean to be neither
light or irreverent. I mean simply to indicate that some men are
worth a great deal more to themselves and to their fellows than
others.

So, when I look abroad upon the world, and see men shaving their
heads, and wearing nasty hair shirts, and shutting themselves up
in cells, and living lives of celibacy, and when I see women
retiring from the world which they were sent to adorn, populate,
and bless, and Shakers driving around in square wagons and
studiously ugly garments, and Christians who should know better
abandoning all the bright and cheerful things of life, and feeling
that there is merit in mortification, I cannot but feel that God
looks down upon it all with sadness and pity. After doing every
thing in His power to make His children happy--after filling the
world with good things for their use, and giving them abundant
faculties for enjoying them--after endowing them with beauty, and
a sense of that which is beautiful--it must be sad to Him to see
them wandering about in strange disguises, hugging to their
half-rebellious hearts the awful mistake that, however much they
may suffer, they are gaining favor thereby in the sight of their
Maker. Of course, I believe in self-denial, and in the nobility
of self-denial, for the good of others; but I believe that all
self-denial that partakes of the character of penance, in whatever
form and under whatever circumstances it may develop itself, is
always a thing of mischief, and always a thing of error. It has its
basis in the miserable theory that there is something in the
passions and appetites with which God has constituted man that is
essentially bad--a theory as impious as it is injurious--as
fatal to all just conceptions of the divine Being and of man's
relations to Him, as to all human happiness.

Every thing which is truly admirable is good, and good and
desirable in the degree by which it is admirable. A beautiful face
and form are admirable, and just as good as they are admirable--
just as good in their element of beauty. They are good for that
quality, and in that quality, which excites our admiration. A
beautiful bonnet, a beautiful dress, a beautiful brooch or
necklace, are all admirable, and good because they are admirable,
or good because every thing admirable is necessarily good. A
family over which the father presides with tender dignity, and in
which the mother moves with love's divinest ministry--where the
faces of innocent children are shining, while their voices make
music sweeter than the morning songs of birds--is admirable, and
it is good in all those respects which make it admirable. A
well-dressed man or woman is admirable, and that thing is good in
itself which makes them so. A man who carries his heart in his
hand, who deals both justly and generously by men, who bears a
sunny face and pleasant words into society, whose cultured mind
enriches freely all with whom it is brought into relation, who has
abundant charity for the weak and erring, and who takes life and
what it brings him contentedly, is an admirable man, and good in
all the points which make him admirable. A house that presents a
harmonious and handsome interior to the eye of the passenger, and
whose exterior combines equal convenience and elegance, is
admirable, and, by that token, good.

Now these very simple propositions have their correlatives, which
it is not necessary to set down in order, any further than fairly
to illustrate my point. Things that are not admirable are not
good. If the dress of a Shaker is not admirable, it is not good.
If that sort of life which is led in a cloister, by monks or nuns,
is not admirable, it is not good. If a man who professes to be a
Christian lives a life out of which is shut all with which an
unsophisticated humanity sympathizes--a life barren of attractive
fruit--a life bare in all its surroundings--a life with no genial
outflow and expression--a life of niggardly negatives rather than
of generous positives--then that life is not admirable, and if it
be not admirable it cannot be good in those respects. A man may
carry along with such a life as this a spotless conscience and a
strict devotion to apprehended duty, and these may be admirable
and good, but the other characteristics cannot be either; and
however much God may approve his honest heart and honest endeavor,
He cannot admire the style of manhood in which they have their
dull and difficult illustration. The idea that I wish definitely
to convey is this: that on the basis of a right heart, God would
have us build up a bright, generous, genial, expressive Christian
character, and use gratefully and gladly all those things which He
has prepared to make life cheerful and admirable. I believe a
saint ought to have a better tailor than a sinner, and be in all
manly ways a better fellow. I believe a true Christian should be
in every thing that constitutes and belongs to a man the most
admirable man in the world.

I have an idea that God looks with the same kind of contempt on
the prominent characteristics of certain styles of Christian men
and women, that men of the world do. There is nothing admirable in
cant and whine, and nasal psalm-singing, and men whose hearts are
livers and whose blood is bile; and I cannot believe that He
blames people for not admiring them, and not being attracted to
them. I do not believe that an admirable Christian life is
repulsive to the men of the world. I believe that wherever the
human mind recognizes a rounded, chastened, rich, and outspoken
Christian character, whether it belong to manhood or womanhood, it
admires it, and feels attracted to it, by the degree in which it
admires it. I believe, moreover, that the Christianity which
discards as vanities those things which God has provided for the
pleasure of His children, and mortifies the love of beauty, and
adopts the theory that God is pleased with penance, and degrades,
abuses, and traduces the body to win greater sanctity of soul, and
finds a sin in every sweet of sense, is a bastard Christianity.
God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.




LESSON VII.

THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN.


  "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
   Are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes play on;
   Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
   Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tones."
   JOHN KEATS.

  "I am as free as Nature first made man." DRYDEN.

                 "What she wills to do or say
   Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best."  MILTON.

It was the sarcastic remark of a crusty old parson of Connecticut
that woman has the undoubted right to shave and sing bass, if she
chooses to do so. I question the right of bearded man to shave
himself, and I will not concede that woman has a superior right,
based on inferior necessities; but believing that man has an
undoubted right to sing bass, I am inclined to accord the same
right to woman. Woman is a female man, and there is no reason
that I know of why she should not have the same rights, precisely,
that a male man has. I claim for myself, and for man, the
privilege of singing treble, under certain circumstances; and why
should I not accord to woman the right to sing bass? The brave old
chorals of Germany would hardly be sung with much effect were the
airs denied to the masculine voice, yet if it be man's prerogative
to sing bass, it is surely woman's to sing treble. If it be
usurpation for her to grope among the gutturals of the masculine
clef, it is gross presumption for him to attempt to leap the
five-rail fence that stands between him and high C. I put this
consideration forward for the purpose of stopping every caviller's
mouth upon the subject, until I present arguments of a broader and
more comprehensive character, in support of woman's right to sing
bass.

It is claimed by those who deny woman's right to sing bass that
she is needed for the treble and alto parts. Needed by whom?
Needed by man? But who gave man the right to set up his needs as
the law of woman's life? If man needs treble and alto, I hope he
may get them. He has the undoubted right to sing both parts to
suit his own fancy, or to hire others to do it for him. Man needs
buttons on his shirts, and clean linen, but for the life of me I
cannot see why that need defines a woman's duty in any respect.
Let him do his own washing, and sew on his own buttons. Suppose a
woman should need to have hooks and eyes sewed upon her dress, as
some of them do, sometimes, after taking a very long breath, would
that determine it to be man's duty to sew them on? "It is a poor
rule that will not work both ways." This is one of the illustrations of
man's selfishness--that he sets up his needs as the rule by which the
rights of one-half of the human race are to be determined.

This same selfishness of man will demand that I reconsider this
talk, and will accuse me of sophistry. It will declare that I do
not state the case fairly. It will say that woman needs money with
which to buy her dresses and procure her food, and strong hands to
labor for her and protect her, and that these needs do indeed
define man's duty with respect to her. But I place all this on the
ground of gallantry and humanity. Of course, we are all very glad
to do these things, you know,--we who have human feelings--but
woman has no right to them, based upon her need--particularly if
she be a woman who insists, as I do, upon her indefeasible right
to sing bass. I know that it helps things along for a woman to
look after a man's linen and buttons, and do his fine work
generally, because she seems to have a kind of natural knack at
the business. I am aware that it is exceedingly pleasant to hear a
woman sing treble, if she sings it well, but I am talking, be it
remembered, of woman's right to sing bass. Let us stick to the
question.

The enemies of this highest among the rights of woman are fond of
alluding to the fact that only here and there a woman can be found
who wishes to avail herself of her right, and practically to enter
upon the work of singing bass. The large majority of women prefer
to sing the soprano, while a few, of moderate views, adopt alto as
a kind of compromise. But what has this fact to do with the matter
of right in the premises? Most people prefer beef-steak without
onions, but I never knew that fact to be brought forward as an
argument against the right of a man to eat it with onions. It is
possible, indeed, that if people were more accustomed to eating
beef-steak with onions, or those savory vegetables were less
objectionable in their style of perfume, there would be a majority
in favor of the associated luxuries. We must remember, too, in
considering this aspect of the question, that woman is, to a
certain extent, a creature of whims. (She is exceedingly apt to
adopt a practice because it is fashionable.) If it were
fashionable for woman to sing bass, how long would it be before
the lower tones would find full development? And how long would it
be before the men themselves would repeat those words of the
immortal bard:--

                             "Her voice was ever soft,
  Gentle and _low_,--An excellent thing in woman"?

After all, this sort of argument against woman's right to sing
bass answers itself. If the preference of women generally for the
soprano and alto be a good reason for their confining themselves
to the performance of those parts, then a change of preference
would be a valid reason for their leaving them. If individual
right goes with general preference, then the pillars of the
universe are uprooted, or we have no pillars worth mentioning. I
suppose that women generally prefer in-door to out-of-door
employments--labor that draws less upon muscle, and more upon
ingenuity and delicate-fingered facility; but that settles nothing
as to their right to engage in muscular toils in the open air. The
German peasant-woman has labored out-of-doors for many generations.
The result has been the gradual approach to each other of her hips
and shoulders, the extinguishment of that portion of her person known
as the waist, and some noticeable flatness over the cerebral organs;
but the German peasant-woman has her right, and that is worth any
sacrifice, you know. If she prefers hoeing cabbages to spinning flax,
who shall hinder her? If all women should prefer hoeing cabbages to
spinning flax, or any variety of yarn, who shall hinder them? So far
as man is concerned, woman has a right to grow her shoulders just as
near her hips, and wear a head as flat as she pleases. In short, the
general preference of women with respect to any thing decides no
question of individual right, whatever.

I will not admit that the general preference of women for private
life imposes any obligation upon any woman to abstain from public
life, or affects in any way her right to enter upon public life. I
am aware that one would not like to have one's wife or sister an
opera-singer, or a public dancer, or a preacher, or a doctor in
general practice, or a circus-rider, or a popular lecturer, or an
actress; but I am talking about the question of right. Most women
would shrink from war--from its fatigues, its dangers, its bloody
strife; but Joan of Arc asserted her right to go into war; and her
name is engrossed upon the scroll of fame. All women have the same
right to go to war that she had. I confess that I should like to
see a regiment of women six feet high, officered by women, all
dressed in Balmorals illustrating the national colors, marching to
battle in as close order as the peculiarity of their garments would
permit, and accompanied by a corps of cavalry in sidesaddles.
Such an assertion of woman's right would be grand beyond
description. I should not care to live on very intimate terms with
the colonel of the regiment, but I don't know as that has any thing
to do with this question.

I was talking, however, about the right of women to sing bass, and
must go on. It is declared by those who oppose this right that
woman has no natural organs and aptitudes for bass. This is the
strong-point of the enemy, but it amounts to nothing. If woman
fails, apparently, in organs and aptitudes for this part, it only
shows what long years of abuse will accomplish. Let us never
forget in this discussion that woman is only a female man, that
there is no such thing as "sex of soul," and that woman's vocal
organs are built exactly like man's--as much like man's as her
hands and her feet and her head are like his--a little smaller,
perhaps,--that's all. It is a familiar fact, I presume, that the
little colts born of South American dams take to ambling as their
natural step, simply because the men of South America have taught
the fathers and mothers of these colts to amble through uncounted
generations. Now in North America we train horses to trot, and the
consequence is that amblers are scarce, and in most cases have to
be educated to their gait. This is the way in which nature adapts
herself to popular want and popular usage. The large variety of
apples which load our orchards were developed from the insignificant
crab, and the peach was the child of the almond, or the almond of
the peach--I have forgotten which. Now I suppose (with some feeble
doubts about it) that man and woman started exactly together, that
her singing treble better than she does bass results from usage,
and that her singing treble rather than bass was purely a matter of
accident at first. All analogy teaches me that if she had begun on
bass, and the other part had been given to man, we should be hearing
today of Ma'lle Patti, "the charming new baritone," and "the
magnificent basso," Madame Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, while admiring
crowds would toss flowers to Carl Formes, "the unapproachable
soprano," or Mario, "the king of contraltos."

I suppose that those who maintain that woman has no natural organs
and aptitudes for singing bass, would say that she has no natural
organs and aptitudes for boxing and playing at ball. Just because
woman holds her fists the wrong side up, as if she were kneading
bread rather than flesh, it is claimed that she was not made for
the "manly art of self-defence," and from the wholly incompetent
facts that she cannot throw a ball three feet against a common
north-west wind, and is not as fleet as a deer, it is judged that
she has no right to engage in base-ball. But suppose all women had
been accustomed to boxing and playing ball as much as the men have
been; would they not have arrived at corresponding excellence? I
know that as women are now (and they please me exceedingly) they
have not muscle to "hit from the shoulder" with force sufficient
to make them formidable antagonists; and I am aware that they lack
something in the length of limb requisite for the rapid locomotion
of the ball-ground; but they have never had a chance. See what
the washerwomen have done for themselves. They seem to be a
separate race of beings, for they all have large arms, and
shoulders that would do honor to Tom Sayers. I have seen negro
slave women at work in the field, with a muscular development that
would be the envy of a Bowery boy. The washerwoman and the field
slave show what can be done by cultivation. I know that their
style of figure is not quite so attractive as I have seen, and I
know that wherever there is an extraordinary tax upon muscle there
is an extraordinary repression of mind and blunting of the
sensibilities, but it must be remembered that we are talking about
rights, now. I claim and maintain, (I may as well come out with
the whole of it,) that a woman has a right to do any thing she
chooses to do, with perhaps the unimportant exception of becoming
the father of a family.

The truth is that women have never had a fair chance. They can do
any thing they are trained to do. The proper physical culture of
woman, carried on through a competent number of generations, would
develop her beyond all our present conceptions. She would be
likely to arrive at a high condition of muscle and a low condition
of mind, very unlike our present idea of the noblest type of
womanhood; but very possibly our ideals of womanhood are
conventional, or traditional. She has hands, and has a right to
use them; a tongue, and the right to wag it in her own way;
powers corresponding to those of man in all important respects,
and the right to develop and employ them according to her taste
and choice. I deny, to man, the privilege of defining the rights
and duties of woman. A woman is mistress of her own actions and
judge of her own powers and aptitudes; and if any woman thinks
that she can do a man's work better than what society considers
her own, then she has an undeniable right to do it, if she can get
it to do, and is willing to accept the work with the conditions
that attend it.

I am a firm believer in "woman's rights"--especially her right to
do as she pleases. It is possible that, before the law, she is not
in possession of all her rights, but all wrongs in this direction
will be corrected as time progresses. I speak particularly at this
time of her right to sing bass, because it is a representative
right, and covers, as with a lid, a whole chest full of others.
Yet while I claim this right, I confess that I should not care to
see it exercised to any great extent, for I think that treble is,
by all odds, the finer and more attractive part in music. Is it
worth while to exercise the right of singing bass, when it costs a
good deal to get up a voice for it, and when treble comes natural
and easy, and is very much pleasanter to the ear? Bass would be a
bad thing for a lullaby, and could only silence a baby by scaring
it. If I should have committed to me the melodies of the world, I
would care very little about my right to sing those subordinate
parts that gather around them in obedient harmonies. At least, I
think I would, unless some upstart man should deny my right to
sing any thing but melodies. If it were committed to me to sing
like a bird, I would not care, I think, to exercise my right to
roar like a bull. If I can witch the ears and win the hearts of
men and women by doing that which I can do easily and naturally
and well, then I shall do best not to exercise my right to do that
which I can only do difficultly, and unnaturally, and ill.

Woman, in my apprehension, is the mistress, not alone of the
melody of music, but of the melody of life. Whatever it may be
possible to do by cultivation and a long course of development, it
is doubtful whether a woman would ever sing bass well. I am aware
that she has the right, and the organs, but I question whether her
bass would amount to any thing--whether it would be worth singing.
When women talk with me about their right to vote, and their right
to practise law, and their right to engage in any business which
usage has assigned to man, I say "yes--you have all those rights."
I never dispute with them at all. Indeed, you see how I have put
myself forward as the defender of these same rights; yet I should
be sorry to see them exercised by the women I admire and love.
It is all very well to say that the presence of woman at the ballot-box
would purify it, and restrain the manners of the men around it; but
I have seen enough of the world to learn that all human influence
is reciprocal and reactionary. Man and the ballot-box might gain, but
woman would lose, and men and the ballot-box themselves would lose
in the long run. The ballot-box is the bass, and it should be man's
business to sing it, while woman should give him home melody with
which it should harmonize.

In the matter of rights, I suppose that I should not differ
materially with any strong-minded woman; but I have always
observed that the most truly lovable, humble, pure-hearted,
God-fearing and humanity-loving women of my acquaintance, never
say any thing about these rights, and scorn those of their sex
who do. I have never known a woman who was at once satisfied in her
affections and discontented with her woman's lot and her woman's
work. There is a weak place, or a wrong place, or a rotten place,
in the character or nature of every woman who stands and howls
upon the spot where her Creator placed her, and neglects her own
true work and life while claiming the right to do the work and
live the life of man. I will admit all the rights that such a
woman claims--all that I myself possess--if she will let me alone,
and keep her distance from me. She may sing bass, but I do not
wish to hear her. She is repulsive to me. She offends me.

I believe in women. I believe they are the sweetest, purest, most
unselfish, best part of the human race. I have no doubt on this
subject, whatever. They do sing the melody in all human life, as
well as the melody in music. They carry the leading part, at least
in the sense that they are a step in advance of us, all the way in
the journey heavenward. I believe that they cannot move very widely
out of the sphere which they now occupy, and remain as good as they
now are; and I deny that my belief rests upon any sentimentality,
or jealousy, or any other weak or unworthy basis. A man who has
experienced a mother's devotion, a wife's self-sacrificing love,
and a daughter's affection, and is grateful for all, may be weakly
sentimental about some things, but not about women. He would help
every woman he loves to the exercise of all the rights which hold
dignity and happiness for her. He would fight that she might have
those rights, if necessary; but he would rather have her lose her
voice entirely, than to hear her sound a bass note so long as a
demi-semi-quaver.




LESSON VIII.

AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION.


               "Keen are the pangs
   Advancement often brings. To be secure,
   Be humble. To be happy, be content." JAMES HURDIS.

  "For not that which men covet most is best;
   Nor that thing worst which men do most refuse.
   But fittest is that each contented rest
   With that they hold." SPENSER.

  "Men have different spheres. It is for some to evolve great
moral truths, as the Heavens evolve stars, to guide the sailor on
the sea and the traveller on the desert; and it is for some, like
the sailor and the traveller, simply to be guided."--BEECHER.

A venerable gentleman who once occupied a prominent position in a
leading New England college, was remarking recently upon the
difficulty which he experienced in obtaining servants who would
attend to their duties. He had just dismissed a girl of sixteen,
who was so much "above her business" as to be intolerable. The
girl's father, who was an Englishman, called upon him for an
explanation. The employer told his story, every word of which the
father received without question, and then remarked, with
considerable vehemence: "_It is all owing to those cursed public
schools_." The father retired, and the old professor sat down
and thought about it; and the result of his thinking did not
differ materially from that of the father. It was not, of course,
that there was any thing in the studies pursued which had tended
to unfit the girl for her duties. It was very possible indeed for
the girl to have been a better servant in consequence of her
intelligence. There was nothing in English grammar or the
multiplication table to produce insubordination and discontent.
There was nothing in the whole case that tended to condemn public
schools, as such; but it was the spirit inculcated by the teachers
of public schools, which had spoiled this girl for her place, and
which has spoiled, and is still spoiling, thousands of others.

Let us look for a moment into the influence of such a motto as the
following, written over a school-house door--always before the
eyes of the pupils, and always alluded to by school committees and
visitors who are invited to "make a few remarks":

  _"Nothing is impossible to him who wills."_

This abominable lie is placed before a room full of children and
youth, of widely varying capacities, and great diversity of
circumstances. They are called upon to look at it, and believe in
it. Suppose a girl of humble mental abilities and humble
circumstances looks at this motto, and says: "I 'will' be a lady.
I 'will' be independent. I 'will' be subject to no man's or
woman's bidding." Under these circumstances, the girl's father,
who is poor, removes her from school, and tells her that she must
earn her living. Now I ask what kind of a spirit she can carry
into her service, except that of surly and impudent discontent?
She has been associating in school, perhaps, with girls whom she
is to serve in the family she enters. Has she not been made unfit
for her place by the influences of the public school? Have not her
comfort and her happiness been spoiled by those influences? Is her
reluctant service of any value to those who pay her the wages of
her labor?

It is safe, at least, to make the proposition that public schools
are a curse to all the youth whom they unfit for their proper
places in the world. It is the favorite theory of teachers that
every man can make of himself any thing that he really chooses to
make. They resort to this theory to rouse the ambition of their
more sluggish pupils, and thus get more study out of them. I have
known entire schools instructed to aim at the highest places in
society, and the most exalted offices of life. I have known
enthusiastic old fools who made it their principal business to go
from school to school, and talk such stuff to the pupils as would
tend to unfit every one of humble circumstances and slender
possibilities for the life that lay before him. The fact is
persistently ignored, in many of these schools, established
emphatically for the education of the people, that the majority of
the places in this world are subordinate and low places. Every boy
and girl is taught to "be something" in the world, which would be
very well if being "something" were being what God intended they
should be; but when being "something" involves the transformation
of what God intended should be a respectable shoemaker into a very
indifferent and a very slow minister of the Gospel, the harmful
and even the ridiculous character of the instruction becomes
apparent.

There are two classes of evil results attending the inculcation of
these favorite doctrines of the school teachers--first, the
unfitting of men and women for humble places; and, second, the
impulsion of men of feeble power into high places, for the duties
of which they have neither natural nor acquired fitness. There are
no longer any American girls who go out to service in families.
They went into mills from the chamber and the kitchen, but now
they have left the mills, and their places are filled by Scotch
and Irish girls. Why is this? Is it because that among the
American girls there are none of poverty, and of humble powers?
Is it because they are not wanted? Or is it because they have
become unfitted for such services as these, and feel above them?
Is it not because they have become possessed of notions that would
render them uncomfortable in family service, and render any
family they might serve uncomfortable? An American servant, who
good-naturedly accepts her condition, and knows and loves her place,
who is willing to acknowledge that she has a mistress, and who
enters into her department of the family life as a harmonious and
happy member, may exist, but I do not know her. People have ceased
inquiring for American servants. They would like them, generally,
because they are intelligent and Protestant, but they cannot get
them because they are unwilling to accept service, and the
obligations and conditions it imposes. Where all the American girls
are, I do not know. I can remember the time when thrifty farmers,
mechanics, and tradesmen took wives from the kitchens of gentlemen
where they were employed,--good, intelligent, self-respectful women
they were, too--who became modest mistresses of thrifty families
afterward;--but that is all done with now. Under the present mode
of education, nobody is fitted for a low place, and everybody is
taught to look for a high one.

If we go into a school exhibition, our ears are deafened by
declamation addressed to ambition. The boys have sought out from
literature every stirring appeal to effort, and every extravagant
promise of reward. The compositions of the girls are of the same
general tone. We hear of "infinite yearnings," from the lips of
girls who do not know enough to make a pudding, and of being
polished "after the similitude of a palace" from those who do not
comprehend the commonest duties of life. Every thing is on the
high-pressure principle. The boys, all of them, have the general
idea that every thing that is necessary to become great men is to
try for it; and each one supposes it possible for him to become
Governor of the State, or President of the Union. The idea of
being educated to fill a humble office in life is hardly thought
of, and every bumpkin who has a memory sufficient for the words
repeats the stanza:--

  "Lives of great men all remind us
    We can make our lives sublime,
   And departing, leave behind us
    Footprints on the sands of time."

There is a fine ring to this familiar quatrain of Mr. Longfellow,
but it is nothing more than a musical cheat. It sounds like truth,
but it is a lie. The lives of great men all remind us that they
have made their own memory sublime, but they do not assure us at
all that we can leave footprints like theirs behind us. If you do
not believe it, go to the cemetery yonder. There they lie--ten
thousand upturned faces--ten thousand breathless bosoms. There was
a time when fire flashed in those vacant orbits, and warm
ambitions pulsed in those bosoms. Dreams of fame and power once
haunted those hollows skulls. Those little piles of bones that
once were feet ran swiftly and determinedly through forty, fifty,
sixty, seventy years of life; but where are the prints they left?
"He lived--he died--he was buried"--is all that the headstone
tells us. We move among the monuments, we see the sculpture, but
no voice comes to us to say that the sleepers are remembered for
any thing they ever did. Natural affection pays its tribute to its
departed object, a generation passes by, the stone grows gray, and
the man has ceased to be, and is to the world as if he had never
lived. Why is it that no more have left a name behind them? Simply
because they were not endowed by their Maker with the power to do
it, and because the offices of life are mainly humble, requiring
only humble powers for their fulfilment. The cemeteries of one
hundred years hence will be like those of to-day. Of all those now
in the schools of this country, dreaming of fame, not one in
twenty thousand will be heard of then,--not one in twenty thousand
will have left a footprint behind him.

Now I believe that a school, in order to be a good one, should be
one that will fit men and women, in the best way, for the humble
positions that the great mass of them must necessarily occupy in
life. It is not necessary that boys and girls be taught any less
than they are taught now. They should receive more practical
knowledge than they do now, without a doubt, and less of that
which is simply ornamental, but they cannot know too much. An
intelligent gardener is better than a clod-hopper, and an educated
nurse is better than an ignorant one; but if the gardener and the
nurse have been spoiled for their business and their condition, by
the sentiments which they have imbibed with their knowledge, they
are made uncomfortable to themselves, and to those whom they
serve. I do not care how much knowledge a man may have acquired in
school, that school has been a curse to him if its influence has
been to make him unhappy in his place, and to fill him with futile
ambitions.

The country has great reason to lament the effect of the kind of
instruction upon which I have remarked. The universal greed for
office is nothing but an indication of the appetite for
distinction which has been diligently fed from childhood. It is
astonishing to see the rush for office on the occasion of the
change of a State or National Administration. Men will leave quiet
and remunerative employments, and subject themselves to mean
humiliations, simply to get their names into a newspaper, and to
achieve a little official importance and social distinction. This
desire for distinction seems to run through the whole social body,
as a kind of moral scrofula, developing itself in various ways,
according to circumstances and peculiarities of constitution. The
consequence is that politics have become the pursuit of small men,
and we no longer have an opportunity to put the best men into
office. The scramble for place among fools is so great and so
successful, that men of dignity and modesty retire from the field
in disgust. Everybody wants to "be something," and in order to be
something, everybody must leave his proper place in the world, and
assume a position which God never intended he should fill. Look in
upon a State legislature once, and you will find sufficient
illustration of my meaning. Not one man in five of the whole
number possesses the first qualification for making the laws of a
State, and half of them never read the constitution of the
country. I mean no contempt for the good, honest men of whom our
State legislatures are principally composed, but I wish simply to
say that there is nothing in their quality of mind, habits of
thought, intellectual power, or style of pursuits that fits them
for the great and momentous functions of legislation. They are
there, a set of "nobodies," mainly for the purpose of becoming
"somebodies," and not for any object connected with the good of
the State.

Somehow, all the students in all our schools get the idea, that a
man in order to be "somebody" must be in public life. Now think of
the fact that the millions attending school in this country have
in some way acquired this idea, and that only one in every one
thousand of these is either needed in public life, or can win
success there. Let this fact be realized, and it is easy to see
that the nine hundred and ninety-nine will feel that they are
somehow cheated out of their birthright. They desired to be in
public life, and be "somebody," but they are not, and so their
life grows tame and tasteless to them. They are disappointed. The
men solace themselves with a petty justice's commission, or a town
office of some kind, and the women--some of them--talk about
"woman's rights," and make themselves notorious and ridiculous at
public meetings. I think women have rights which they do not at
present enjoy, but I have very little confidence in the motives of
their petticoated champions, who court mobs, delight in notoriety,
and glory in their opportunity to burst away from private life,
and be recognized by the public as "somebodies." I insist on
this:--that private and even obscure life is the normal condition
of the great multitude of men and women in this world; and that,
to serve this private life, public life is instituted. Public life
has no legitimate significance save I as it is related to the
service of private life. It requires peculiar talents and peculiar
education, and brings with it peculiar trials; and the man best
fitted for it would be the last man confidently to assert his fitness
for it.

Thousands seek to become "somebodies" through the avenues of
professional life; and so professional life is full of "nobodies."
The pulpit is crowded with goodish "nobodies"--men who have no
power--no unction--no mission. They strain their brains to write
common-places, and wear themselves out repeating the rant of their
sect and the cant of their schools. The bar is cursed with
"nobodies" as much as the pulpit. The lawyers are few; the
pettifoggers are many. The bar, more than any other medium, is
that through which the ambitious youth of the country seek to
attain political eminence. Thousands go into the study of law, not
so much for the sake of the profession, as for the sake of the
advantages it is supposed to give them for political preferment.
An ambitious boy who has taken it into his head to be "somebody,"
always studies law; and as soon as he is "admitted to the bar" he
is ready to begin his political scheming. Multitudes of lawyers
are a disgrace to their profession, and a curse to their country.
They lack the brains necessary to make them respectable, and the
morals requisite for good neighborhood. They live on quarrels, and
breed them that they may live. They have spoiled themselves for
private life, and they spoil the private life around them. As for
the medical profession, I tremble to think how many enter it
because they have neither piety enough for preaching, nor brains
enough to practice law. When I think of the great army of little
men that is yearly commissioned to go forth into the world with a
case of sharp knives in one hand, and a magazine of drugs in the
other, I heave a sigh for the human race. Especially is all this
lamentable when we remember that it involves the spoiling of
thousands of good farmers and mechanics, to make poor professional
men, while those who would make good professional men are obliged
to attend to the simple duties of life, and submit to preaching
that neither feeds nor stimulates them, and medicine that kills or
fails to cure them.

There must be something radically wrong in our educational system,
when youth are generally unfitted for the station which they are
to occupy, or are forced into professions for which they have no
natural fitness. The truth is that the stuff talked to boys and
girls alike, about "aiming high," and the assurances given them,
indiscriminately, that they can be any thing that they choose to
become, are essential nuisances. Our children all go to the public
schools. They are all taught these things. They all go out into
the world with high notions, and find it impossible to content
themselves with their lot. They had hoped to realize in life that
which had been promised them in school, but all their dreams have
faded, and left them disappointed and unhappy. They envy those
whom they have been taught to consider above them, and learn to
count their own lives a failure. Girls starve in a mean poverty,
or do worse, because they are too proud to work in a chamber, or
go into a shop. American servants are obsolete, all common
employments are at a discount, the professions are crowded to
overflowing, the country throngs with demagogues, and a general
discontent with a humble lot prevails, simply because the youth of
America have had the idea drilled into them that to be in private
life, in whatever condition, is to be, in some sense, a "nobody."
It is possible that the schools are not exclusively to blame for
this state of things, and that our political harangues, and even
our political institutions, have something to do with it.

What we greatly need in this country is the inculcation of soberer
views of life. Boys and girls are bred to discontent. Everybody is
after a high place, and nearly everybody fails to get one; and,
failing, loses heart, temper, and content. The multitude dress
beyond their means, and live beyond their necessities, to keep up
a show of being what they are not. Farmers' daughters do not love
to become farmers' wives, and even their fathers and mothers
stimulate their ambition to exchange their station for one which
stands higher in the world's estimation. Humble employments are
held in contempt, and humble powers are everywhere making high
employments contemptible. Our children need to be educated to
fill, in Christian humility, the subordinate offices of life which
they must fill, and taught to respect humble callings, and to
beautify and glorify them by lives of contented and glad industry.
When public schools accomplish an end so desirable as this, they
will fulfil their mission, and they will not before. I seriously
doubt whether one school in a hundred, public or private,
comprehends its duty in this particular. They fail to inculcate
the idea that the majority of the offices of life are humble, that
the powers of the majority of the youth which they contain have
relation to those offices, that no man is respectable when he is
out of his place, and that half of the unhappiness of the world
grows out of the fact, that, from distorted views of life, men are
in places where they do not belong. Let us have this thing
altogether reformed.




LESSON IX.

PERVERSENESS.


  "Because she's constant, he will change.
    And kindest glances coldly meet,
   And all the time he seems so strange,
    His soul is fawning at her feet."
   COVENTRY PATMORE.

  "All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so as to do as
little good and plague and disappoint as many people as possible."
--HAZLITT.

It seems to me, either that there is a great deal of human nature
in a pig, or that there is a great deal of pig in human nature. I
find myself always sympathizing with a pig that wishes to go in an
opposite direction to that in which its owner would drive it. It
would be a sufficient reason for me to desire to go eastward, that
a man was behind me, with an oath in his mouth and a very heavy
boot on his foot, endeavoring to drive me westward. We are jealous
of our freedom. We naturally rise in opposition to a will that
undertakes to command our movements. This is not the result of
education at all; it is pure human nature. Command a child--who
shall be only old enough to understand you--to refrain from some
special act, and you excite in his heart a desire to do that act;
and he will have, nine times in ten, no reason for his desire to
do it but your command that he shall not. The youngest human soul
that has a will at all, takes the first occasion to declare its
independence.

Now, I believe this principle in human nature to be, in itself,
good. It is that which declares a man's right to himself--that
which asserts personal liberty in thought, will, and movement. I
believe it existed in Adam and Eve, and that it is more than
likely that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was
despoiled because our beautiful great-grandmother, (for whom I
confess much sympathy and affection,) was forbidden to touch it.
It is a principle which should always be carefully distinguished
from perverseness, in all our dealings with young and old, and in
all our estimates of human character. When a child obeys a man, or
when one man obeys another, it should always be for good and
sufficient reason. Neither child nor man should be expected to
surrender his right to himself without the presentation to him of
the proper motive. When, yielding to this motive, the soul
consents to be directed or led, it becomes obedient. Compulsion
may secure conformity, but never obedience. If I, as a child or
man, am to yield myself to the direction of any other man, that
man is bound to present to me an adequate motive for the
surrender. God throws upon me personal responsibility--gives me to
myself--and no man, parent or otherwise, can make me truly
obedient without giving me the motive for obedience. When a child
or a man fails to yield to the legitimate motives of obedience, he
is perverse, and it is about perverseness in some of its forms of
manifestation that I propose to talk in this article.

At starting, I must give perverseness a somewhat broader meaning
than that thus far indicated. I will say that that person is
perverse who, from vanity, or pride of opinion and will, or
malice, or any mean consideration, refuses to yield his conduct
and himself to those motives and influences which his reason and
conscience recognize to be pure and good and true. In its least
aggravated form, perhaps, we find it among lovers. Women will
sometimes persistently ignore a passion which they know has taken
full possession of them, and grieve the heart that loves them by a
coldness and indifference which they do not feel at all. Rather
than acknowledge their affection for one whose loss would kill
them, or, what would be the same thing, kill the world for them,
they have lied, grown sick, and gone nearly insane. This is a
perverseness very uncommon. Sometimes lovers have been very tender
and devoted so long as a doubt of ultimate mutual possession
remained to give zest to their passion, but the moment this doubt
has been removed, one or the other has become incomprehensibly
indifferent.

I have noticed that very few married pairs are matches in the
matter of warmth and expression of passion between the parties.
The man will be all devotion and tenderness--brimming with
expressions of affection and exhibitions of fondness, and the
woman all coolness and passivity, or (which is much more common)
the woman will be active in expression, lavishing caresses and
tendernesses upon a man who very possibly grows harder and colder
with every delicate proof that the whole wealth of his wife's
nature is poured at his feet, as a libation upon an altar. It is
here that we see some of the strangest cases of perverseness that
it is possible to conceive. I know men who are not bad men--who,
I suppose, really love and respect their wives--and who would deny
themselves even to heroism to give them the comforts and luxuries
of life, yet who find themselves moved to reject with poorly-covered
scorn, and almost to resent, the varied expressions of affection to
which those wives give utterance. I know wives who long to pour
their hearts into the hearts of their husbands, and to get sympathetic
and fitting response, but who are never allowed to do it. They live
a constrained, suppressed, unsatisfied life. They absolutely pine
for the privilege of saying freely what they feel, in all love's varied
languages, toward men who love them, but who grow harder with
every approach of tenderness and colder with every warm, invading
breath. A shower that purifies the atmosphere, and refreshes the
face of heaven itself, sours cream, just as love's sweetest expression
sours these men.

I have known wives to walk through such an experience as this into
a condition of abject slavery--to waste their affection without
return, until they have become poor, and spiritless, and mean. I
have known them to lose their will--to become the mere dependent
mistresses of their husbands--to be creeping cravens in dwellings
where it should be their privilege to move as radiant queens. I
have known them thrown back upon themselves, until they have
become bitter railers against their husbands--uncomfortable
companions--openly and shamelessly flouting their affection. I do
not know what to make of the perverseness which induces a man to
repel the advances of a heart which worships him, and to become
hard and tyrannical in the degree by which that heart seeks to
express its affection for him. There are husbands who would take
the declaration that they do not love their wives as an insult,
yet who hold the woman who loves them in fear and restraint
through their whole life. I know wives who move about their houses
with a trembling regard to the moods and notions of their
husbands--wives who have no more liberty than slaves, who never
spend a cent of money without a feeling of guilt, and who never
give an order about the house without the same doubt of their
authority that they would have if they were only housekeepers,
employed at a very economical salary. I can think of no proper
punishment for such husbands except daily ducking in a horse-pond,
until reformation. Yet these asses are so unconscious of their
detestable habits of feeling and life, that, probably, not one of
them who reads this will think that I mean him, but will wonder
where I have lived to fall in with such outlandish people.

The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this
world is a woman's heart. Why some graceful and most amiable women
whom I know will persist in loving some men whom I also know, is
more than I know. I will not call their love an exhibition of
perverseness, though it looks like it; but that these men with
these rich, sweet hearts in their hands, grow sour and snappish,
and surly and tyrannical and exacting, is the most unaccountable
thing in the world. If a pig will not allow himself to be driven,
he will follow a man who offers him corn, and he will eat the
corn, even though he puts his feet in the trough; but there are
men--some of them of Christian professions--who take every
tenderness their wives bring them, and every expression of
affection, and every service, and every yearning sympathy, and
trample them under feet without tasting them, and without a look
of gratitude in their eyes. Hard, cold, thin-blooded, white-livered,
contemptible curmudgeons--they think their wives weak and
foolish, and themselves wise and dignified! I beg my readers to
assist me in despising them. I do not feel adequate to the task of
doing them justice.

There is another exhibition of perverseness which we sometimes see
in families. There will be, perhaps, from two to half a dozen
sisters in a family, amiable all of them. Now, think of the
reasons which should bind them together in the tenderest sympathy.
They were born of the same mother, they were nursed at the same
heart, they were cradled under the same roof by the same hand,
they have knelt at the side of the same father, their interests,
trials, associates, standing--every thing concerning their family
and social life--are the same. The honor of one intimately
concerns the honor of the other, yet I have known such families of
sisters fly apart the moment they became in any way independent of
each other, as if they were natural enemies. I have seen them take
the part of a friend against any member of the family band, and
become disgusted with one another's society. Where matters have
not gone to this length, I have seen sisters who would never
caress each other, or, by any but the most formal and dignified
methods, express their affection for each other. I have seen them
live together for months and years as inexpressive of affection
for each other as cattle in a stall,--more so: for I have seen a
cow affectionately lick her neighbor's ear by the half-hour, while
among these girls I have failed to see a kiss, or hear a tender
word, or witness any exhibition of sisterly affection whatever.

One of the most common forms of perverseness, though one of the
most subtle and least known, is that shown by people who study to
shut everybody out from a knowledge of their nature and their
life. They make it their grand end and aim to appear to be exactly
what they are not, to appear to believe exactly what they do not
believe, and to appear to feel what they do not feel at all. This
is not because they are ashamed of themselves, or because they
really have any thing to conceal. They have simply taken on this
form of perverseness. They will not, if they can help it, allow
any man to get inside of their natures and characters. If they
write you a letter, they will mislead you. They will say to you
irreverent and shocking things, to prove to you that they are
bold, and unfeeling, and unthoughtful, when they tremble at what
they have written, and really show by their language that they are
afraid, and full of feeling, and very thoughtful. If they have a
sentiment of love for anybody, they take it as a dog would a bone,
and go and dig a hole in the ground and bury it, only resorting to
it in the dark, for private crunching. Very likely they will try
to make you believe that they live a most dainty and delicate life
--that the animals of the field, and the fowls of the air love
them, and come at their call--that clouds arrange themselves in
heaven for their benefit, and are sufficiently paid for the effort
by their admiration--that flowers excite them to frenzy--a very
fine frenzy, indeed--and that all sounds shape themselves to music
in their souls. They would have you think that they live a kind of
charmed life--that the sun woos them, and the moon pines for them,
and the sea sobs because they will not come, and the daisies wait
lovingly for their feet, yet, if you knew the truth, you would see
that they sit discontentedly among the homeliest surroundings of
domestic life, with their sleeves rolled up--confound them!

This variety of perverseness seems very inexplicable. I have seen
much of it, but do not know what to make of it. There is doubtless
something morbid in it. It is often carried to such extremes, and
managed so artfully, that multitudes are deceived by it. I know
of some very beautiful natures that pass in the world for rough
and coarse. I know men who have the reputation of being hard and
harsh, yet who are, inside, and in their own consciousness, as
gentle and sensitive as women--who put on a stern air and a
repellent manner, when they are really yearning for sympathy. I
have seen this air and manner broken through and battered down by
a friendly man, who found what he suspected behind it--a generous,
warm, noble heart. This perverseness seems to be akin to that of
the miser who knows he is rich, takes his highest delight in being
rich, and yet dresses meanly, and fares like a beggar rather than
be thought rich. Women hide themselves more than men. They are
generally more sensitive, and their life and circumscribed habits
have a tendency to the formation of morbid moods, and this among
the number.

Of the perverseness of partisanship in politics much is written, and
my pen need not dip into it; but there is a perverseness exhibited by
Christian churches in their quarrels that should be exposed and
discussed, because some people have an impression that it may
possibly be piety. "For _dum squizzle_, read _permanence_,"
said an editor, correcting a typographical error that had found its
way into his journal. It seems as strange that perverseness should
be mistaken for piety, as that "permanence" should be mistaken for
"dum squizzle," but I believe it often is. Let some little cause of
disturbance arise, and become active in a church, and it is astonishing
how both parties go to work and pray over it. The pastor, perhaps,
has said something on the subject of slavery, or he does not preach
doctrine enough, or he preaches the wrong sort of doctrine, or he
does not visit his people enough, or there is "a row" about the
singing, or about a change in the hymn-books, or about repairing
the church, or buying an organ, or something or other, and
straightway sides are taken, and the wills of both parties get
roused. It is sometimes laughable--it would always be, only that
it is too sad--to see how quickly both parties grow pious, as they
grow perverse. It would seem, as the strife waxes hot, that the
glory of God was never so much in their hearts as now. They pray
with fervor, they are constant in their public religious duties,
they pass through the most scrupulous self-examinations, and then
fight on to the bitter end; believing, I suppose, that they are
really doing God service, when they are only gratifying their own
perverse wills.

Churches have been ruined, or divided, or crippled in their power,
by a cause of quarrel too insignificant to engage the minds of
sensible worldly men for an hour. I have heard it said that church
quarrels are the most violent of all quarrels, because religious
feelings are the strongest feelings of our nature. I confess that
I do not see the force of this statement, for it does not appear
to me that religious feelings have much to do with these quarrels.
I can much more easily see why all personal differences should be
adjusted peaceably in a church, for there it is supposed that the
individual will is subordinated to the cause of religion and the
general good. The real basis of the bitterness of church quarrels
is women. There are no others, except neighborhood quarrels, in
which women mingle, and a neighborhood quarrel will at once be
recognized as more like a church quarrel than any other. Women
have strong feelings, are attracted or repulsed through their
sensibilities, conceive keen likes and dislikes, do not stop to
reason, and are, of course, the readiest and the most devoted
partisans. If the mouths of the women could only be smothered in a
church quarrel, it would be settled much easier. Of all the
perverse creatures in this world, a woman who has thoroughly
committed herself to any man, or any cause, is the least tractable
and reasonable. I hope this statement will not offend my sweet
friends, because it is so true that I cannot conscientiously
retract it.

What the books call pride of opinion, is, nine cases in ten,
simple perverseness. I know a most venerable public teacher of
physiology, whose early theory of the production of animal heat--
very ridiculous in itself--is still yearly announced from his
desk, notwithstanding the fact that the whole world has received
another, whose soundness is demonstrated beyond all question. As
he, year after year, declares his belief that animal heat is
produced by corpuscular friction in the circulating blood, there
is a twinkle of the eyes among his amused auditors which says very
plainly--"the old gentleman does not believe this, himself." The
youngest student before him knows better than to give his theory
a moment's consideration. Well, the old Doctor is not alone. The
world is full of this kind of thing. Men adhere to old opinions
and old policies long after they have learned that they are
shallow or untenable, not from a genuine pride of opinion, (I
doubt very much whether there really is any thing that should be
called pride of opinion,) but from genuine perverseness of
disposition. Men will give, in some heated moment, an opinion
touching some one's character or powers, and, though that opinion
be proved to be wrong a thousand times, they will never
acknowledge that they have made a mistake. This is simple
perverseness, of the meanest variety. There are some kinds of
perverseness which impress one not altogether unpleasantly, but
this affects a man with equal anger and disgust.

Perverseness is a sign of weakness--nay, an element of weakness--
in man or woman. It is no legitimate part of a true character. The
generous, outspoken man, who is not afraid to show himself, and
what there is in him, who cares more about the right way than his
way, who throws away an opinion as he would throw away an old hat,
the moment he finds it is worthless, and who good-naturedly allows
the frictions of society to straighten out all the kinks there are
in him, is the strong man always, and always the one whom men
love. Perverseness is really moral strabismus, and I am shocked to
think what a multitude of squint-eyed souls there will be, when we
come to look into one another's faces in the "undress of
immortality."




LESSON X.

UNDEVELOPED RESOURCES.


  "The world is God's seed-bed. He has planted deep and
multitudinously, and many things there are which have not yet
come up."--BEECHER.

One of the richest and best of the smaller class of American
cities is New Bedford; and the secret of its wealth and beauty is
_oil_. It is but a few years since the immense fleet of vessels
that made that thrifty port their home went out with certainty of
success in their dangerous enterprises, and came back loaded
down with spoil. All that beautiful wealth was won from the
deep, and for years as many ships came and went as there were
dwellings to give them speed and welcome. But the glory and the
gain of the whale-fishery are past. The noble prey, too
persistently and mercilessly pursued, has retired northward, and
hidden among the icebergs. Now, when a ship's crew win a cargo,
they win it from the clutches of eternal frost. It seems certain
that the fishery will dwindle, year after year, until, at last,
only a few adventurers will linger near the pole, to watch for
the rare game that once furnished light for the civilized world.
All this is very unpleasant for New Bedford; but are we to have
no more oil? Is nature failing? Will the time come when people must
sit in darkness?

A few months ago a man in Pennsylvania took it into his head to
probe the ground for the source of a certain oil that made its
appearance upon the surface. Down, down into the bowels of the
earth he thrust his steam-driven harpoon, until he touched the
living fountain of oil, which, gushing up, half drowned him. Now,
all the region round about him swarms with industry. Thousands of
men are hurrying to and fro; the puff of the engine is heard
everywhere; tens of thousands of barrels of oil are rolled out and
turned into the channels of commerce; eager-eyed speculators
throng all the converging avenues of travel, and a waiting world
of consumers take the oil as fast as it is produced. Men in
Virginia, New York, and Ohio are awaking to the consciousness
that, while they have been paying for oil from the far Pacific,
they have been living within three hundred feet of deposits
greater than all the cargoes that ever floated in New Bedford
harbor. For hundreds, and, probably, for thousands of years, men
have walked over these deposits with no suspicion of their
existence. Geologists have looked wise, as is their habit, but
have given no hint of them.

The simple truth appears to be that when, in the history of the
world, it became necessary for these firmly-fastened store-houses
of oil to be uncovered, they were uncovered. Nature had held them
for untold thousands of years for just this emergency. When the
whales ceased spouting, the earth took up the business; and "here
she blows" and "there she blows" are heard in Tideoute and
Titusville, while New Bedford sits sadly by the sea, and thinks of
long absent crews to whom the cry has become strange.

I cannot but look upon this discovery of oil in the earth as one
of the most remarkable and instructive revelations of the age. It
has shown to me that, whenever human necessity demands any thing
of the world of matter, the demand will be honored. Whenever
animal life, or the muscle of man or brute, has shown itself
unequal to the wants of an age, Nature has always responded to the
cry for help. Inventors are only men who act as pioneers, and who
go forward to see what the human race will want next, and to make
the necessary provisions. An inventor has profound faith in the
exhaustless resources of nature. He knows that if he bores far
enough, and bores in the right direction, he will find that which
the world needs. He is often no more than the discoverer of a
secret which nature has kept for the satisfaction of the wants of
an age. A lake yoked to a coal-bed would generally be voted a slow
team, but the inventor of the steam engine saw how it could be
made a very fast and a very powerful one; and we who live now are
able to see that the discovery was made at the right time, and
that, for the emergencies of this latter day, it has really
quadrupled the power of civilized man.

Think how nature has risen grandly up to meet every occasion for
new resources. The revolution wrought by steam in the business of
the world created great wants, every one of which was filled as
soon, as felt. Quicker modes of communicating thought were needed
to give us all the advantages of the increased facility of
carriage, and Mr. Morse was permitted to uncover the telegraph.
More money was wanted for the increased business of the world, and
the gold fields of California and Australia were unveiled. It has
always been so. In the march of the human race along the track of
history, nature has pulled aside the veil in which she hides her
treasures, to display that which she has kept in store for every
epoch. In all the future I have no doubt that whenever oil shall
be wanted, oil will be had for the boring. The world is fitted up
with supplies for all the probable and possible wants of the human
race. We are treading every day upon the lids of great secrets
that await the wants of the larger style and finer type of life
that lie before us. Discovery has but just begun, and will, I
doubt not, be as rife in future ages as in this. There is no end
of it: yet the world is a thing to be weighed and measured. It is
so many miles around it, and so many miles through it. Never mind;
it has more in it than humanity can exhaust.

When we talk of the material world, especially in its relation to
the constantly developing wants of man, we talk simply of the
kitchen and larder of humanity. We have not ascended into the
drawing-room, or conservatory. The moment we step out of the
consideration of manifested nature, we come into a world which may
neither be weighed nor measured--the world of thought. I suppose
that no author has ever entered a large library and stood in its
alcoves and studied its titles long without asking himself the
question: "what is there left for me to do?" It seems as if men
had been reaching in all directions for the discovery of thought
since time began, and as if there were absolutely nothing new to
be said upon any subject. Yet every age has always demanded its
peculiar food, and every age has managed to get it. Certain great
and peculiarly fruitful subjects, blowing in the sea of thought,
have attracted whole fleets of authors for many years, and they
are doubtless chased away no more to return; but, here and there,
while time shall last, strong men will bore down to deposits of
thought unsuspected by any of the preceding generations of men,
and there will gush up streams to light the nations of the world.
For the world of thought is, by its nature, exhaustless. The world
of thought is the world in which God lives, and it is infinite
like himself. We reach our hands out into the dark in any
direction, and find a thought. It was God's before it was ours;
and on beyond that thought, lies another, and still another, _ad
infinitum_. If our arms were long enough, we should be able to
grasp them as well as the first. All that it wants is the long arm
to give us the command of deposits that would astonish the world.
Authors have become eminent according to their power to reach
further than others out into the infinite atmosphere of thought
which envelops them.

Authors, like inventors, are rarely more than discoverers. If God,
who is omniscient, sees all truth, and apprehends the relations of
every truth to every other truth, all an author can do is, of
course, to find out what God's thoughts are. And every age is
certain to find out the thought that is essential to it. When the
world had exhausted Aristotle, and the wide school of philosophers
who embraced him in their systems, Bacon, self-instituted, stepped
before the world as its teacher. He came when he was wanted, and
his age gave him audience, and took the better path which he
pointed out to it. It was in the golden age of the drama--the age
in which the drama was what it never was before, and will never be
again--a great agent of civilization--that Shakspeare appeared. We
call his plays creations, but surely they were not his. He no more
than discovered them. The reason why they stir us so much is that
God created them. His age wanted them, and he had the insight into
the world of thought which enabled him to enter in and lead them
out. The reason why we have not had any great dramatist since, is,
that succeeding ages have not needed one. The great men of later
ages have not recognized the drama as a want of their particular
time. I am aware that there is nothing in this to feed human
pride, but I do not recognize food for human pride as a want of
any age.

We are in the habit of talking of the old authors; and we read
them as if we supposed them wiser than ourselves. We try to feed
on the thought which they discovered, but it is in the main very
innutritious fodder, and the world is learning the fact. We read
and reverence old books less, and read and regard newspapers a
great deal more. The thought which our own age produces is that
which we are learning to prize most. We buy beautiful editions of
Scott, but we read Dickens and Thackeray and Mrs. Stowe, in weekly
and monthly numbers. Milton, in half-calf, stands upon the shelves
of our library undisturbed, while we cut the leaves of "Festus;" and
Keats and Byron and Shelley are all pushed aside that we may
converse with Longfellow and Mrs. Browning. It is not, perhaps,
that the later are the greater, but, being informed with the spirit
of the age in which we have our life, moving among the facts which
concern us, and conscious of our want, they apprehend the true
relations of their age to the world of thought around them. They see
where the sources of oil are exhausted, and bore for new deposits.
It is a comfort to know that they can never bore in vain.

We may be sure that literature will always be as fresh as it has
been. It is possible that we may never have greater men than
Shakspeare and Milton, and Dante and Goethe; but there is nothing
to hinder our having men just as great. Those who are to come will
only bore in different directions, and find new deposits.
Shakspeare and Milton were great writers, but the fields they
occupied were their own. They do not resemble each other in any
particular. Dante and Goethe were great writers, but there are no
points of resemblance between them. When Scott was issuing his
wonderful series of novels, it seemed to his cotemporaries, I
suppose, that there was no field left for a successor; yet
Dickens, in the next generation, won as many readers and as much
admiration as he, in a field whose existence Scott never
suspected. Very different is the world of thought from the world
of matter, in the fact that its deposits are found in no
particular spot. The mind can go out in quest of thought in no
direction without reward; and every man receives from his age
motive and culture which peculiarly prepare him for the work of
supplying its needs. There are some who seem to think that the
golden age of literature is past--that nothing modern is worthy of
notice, and that it is one of the vices of the age that we discard
so much the teachings of the literary fathers. But the world of
thought is exhaustless, and we have only to produce a finer
civilization than the world has ever seen, to secure, as its
consummate flower, a literature of corresponding excellence.

What has been said of the world of matter and the world of
thought, may be said, and is implied, of the world of men. We are
accustomed to say that great emergencies make great men. But this
is not true. Great men are always found to meet great emergencies:
but God makes them, and leads them through a course of discipline
which prepares them for their work. It is one of the remarkable
facts of history, so patent that all have seen and acknowledged
it, that to meet every great epoch a man has been prepared. I mean
it in no irreverent or theological sense when I say that there has
been a series of Christs, whose appearance has denoted the
departure of old dispensations and the inauguration of new. Men
have arisen who have torn down temples, and demolished idols, and
swept away systems, and knocked off fetters, and introduced their
age into a freer, better, and larger life; and it will always be
so while time shall last. Men will arise equal to the wants of
their age wherever men are civilized. The causes which produce
emergencies are the agents which educate men to meet them; and
nature is prodigal of her material among men, as among the things
made for his service.

When, in the history of Christianity, it became necessary to re-assert
and emphasize the truth that "the just shall live by faith," Luther
was raised up; and nothing is more apparent to the student than that
the age which produced him demanded him--that he fitted into his
age, supplied its wants, and cut a new channel, through which the
richest life of the world has flowed for centuries. He found his country
tied up to formalism, scholasticism, and tradition; and by strokes as
remarkable for boldness as strength he set it free. He stands at the
head of a great historical epoch, which was prepared to receive and
crown him. In another field, we have, even in this day, a reformer
whom his age has called for, and who will surely do in the world of
art what Luther did in religion. No one can read Ruskin, and mark his
enthusiasm, his splendid power, his earnestness, his love of truth,
his reverence for nature, and above all, his love of God, without
feeling that he has a great mission to fulfil in the world. I bow myself
in homage before this man, and acknowledge his credentials. He
speaks with authority, and not as the common run of scribes, at all.
Fearlessly he tears the mask away from conventionalism and pretension,
sparing neither age nor nation, and scattering critics right and left

  "Like chaff from the threshing-floor."

It seems to me that the sight of this single, unsupported man,
plunging boldly into a fight with a whole world full of liars and
lies, thrusting right and left, anxious only for the triumph of
truth, and everywhere devoutly recognizing God and his glory, and
Christ and his honor, as the ultimate end of true art, is one of
the most striking and beautiful the world has ever seen. Was there
not need of him? Had not art become superstitious and infidel and
missionless? Had it not faded to little more than the repetition
of old inanities, traditional mannerisms, stereotyped lies? Ruskin
came to tell his age that art was doing nothing toward making the
world better--that, instead of lifting the heart toward God, and
enlarging the field of human sympathy, it was only ministering to
the vanity of men--that nature was dishonored that men might win
the applause of vulgar crowds by falsehood and trickery. Nobly
has he done and nobly is he still doing his work; and the world is
reading him. It matters not that critics carp, and scold, and
whine--the world is reading, and will regard him. The eternal
truth of God and nature is on his side; and we are to see, as I
firmly believe, resulting from his noble labors, a beautiful
resurrection of art from the grave in which its friends have laid
it. It shall come forth, though now bound hand and foot, and be
restored to the sisterhood whose happiness it is to serve and sit
at the feet of Jesus Christ.

But time and space would fail to give illustrations of the truth
that God has always a man ready for an emergency. It is not
necessary to speak of Washington. It would not be wise, perhaps,
to speak of the first Napoleon, because men differ so widely in
their estimate of his work. But of the last Napoleon, it may be
said that he furnishes one of the most notable instances the world
has ever seen of a man prepared for his age. I suppose that no one
believes that there is another man in existence who could have
done for France, and would have done for Europe, under the
circumstances, what Louis Napoleon has done. Never did the central
figure of an elaborate piece of mosaic fit more nicely into its
place, than did Louis Napoleon into the complicated affairs of his
age. They were made for him, and he for them.

Shall the world of matter never fail--shall the world of thought
be exhaustless--shall men be found for all the emergencies of their
race, and, yet, shall divine truth be contained in a nut-shell?
Must the human soul lack food--fresh food--because a generation
long gone has decided that only certain food is fit for the human
soul? I believe that the Bible is a revelation of divine truth to
men, and, believing this, I believe that its most precious deposits
have hardly been touched. I believe that in it, there is special food
prepared for all the wide variety of human souls, and that, as
generation after generation passes away, new deposits will be struck,
so rich in illuminating power that their discoverers will wonder
they had never been seen before. I know that just before me, or
somewhere before me, there is a generation of men who will think
less of being saved, and more of being worth saving, less of dogma,
and more of duty, less of law, and more of love; whose worship will
be less formal, and more truthful and spiritual, and whose God will
be a more tender and considerate father, and less a lawgiver and a
judge. For such a generation, there exists a deposit of divine truth
almost unknown by Christendom. Only here and there have men gathered
it, floating upon the surface. The great deposit waits the touch of
another age.




LESSON XI.

GREATNESS IN LITTLENESS.


    "This earth will all its dust and tears
     Is no less his than yonder spheres;
     And rain-drops weak and grains of sand
     Are stamped by his immediate band."
     STERLING.

                "There is a power
  Unseen, that rules the illimitable world;
  That guides its motions, from the brightest star
  To the least dust of this sin-tainted world."
  THOMSON.

Infinity lies below us as well as above us. There is as much
essential greatness in littleness as in largeness. Mont Blanc--
massive, ice-crowned, imperial--is a great work of nature; yet it
is only an aggregation of materials with which we are thoroughly
familiar. It is only a larger mountain than that which lies within
sight of my window. A dozen Monadnocks or Ascutneys or Holyokes,
more or less, make a Mont Blanc, with glaciers and avalanches and
brooding eternity of frost. Such greatness, though it impresses me
much, is not beyond my comprehension. It can be reckoned by cubic
miles. So with the sea: it is only an expanse of water larger than
the river that winds through the meadows. It is great, but it is
only an aggregate of numerable quantities that my eyes can
measure, and my mind comprehend. These are great objects, and they
are great particularly because they are large. They are above me,
and they lead me upward toward creative infinity.

If I turn my eyes in the other direction, however, I lose myself
in infinity quite as readily. If I pick up a pebble at the foot of
Mont Blanc, and undertake the examination of its structure,--the
elements which compose it, the relations of those elements to each
other, the mode of their combination--I am lost as readily as I
should be in following the footsteps of the stars. If I undertake
to look through a drop of water, I may be arrested at first,
indeed, by the sports and struggles of animalcular life; but at
length I find myself gazing beyond it into infinitude--using it as
a lens through which the Godhead becomes visible to me. I can
dissect from one another the muscles and arteries and veins and
nerves and vital viscera of the human body, but the little insect
that taps a vein upon my hand does it with an instrument and by
the operation of machinery which are beyond my scrutiny. They
belong to a life and are the servants of instincts which I do not
understand at all.

These thoughts come to me, borne by certain memories. I know a
venerable gentleman of Buffalo--Dr. Scott--who did, and who still
does, very great things in a very small way. At the age of seventy
he
became conscious of decaying power of vision. Being professionally a
physician and naturally a philosopher, he conceived the idea that
the eye might be improved by what he denominated a series of
"ocular gymnastics." He therefore undertook to exercise his eyes
upon the formation of minute letters--working upon them until the
organs began to be weary, and then, like a prudent man, resting for
hours. By progressing slowly and carefully, he became, at last,
able to do wonders in the way of fine writing, and also became able
to read the newspapers without glasses. (Here's a hint for some
clever Yankee--as good as a fortune.) Now, reader, prepare for a
large story; but be assured that it is true, and that my hands have
handled and my eyes seen the things of which I tell you. At the age
of seventy-one, Dr. Scott wrote upon an enamelled card with a stile,
on space exactly equal to that of one side of a three-cent
piece,--The Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Parable of the
Ten Virgins, the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Beatitudes,
the fifteenth Psalm, the one hundred and twentieth Psalm, the one
hundred and thirty-third Psalm, the one hundred and thirty-first
Psalm, and the figures "1860." Every word, every letter, and every
point, of all these passages was written exquisitely on this minute
space; and that old man not only saw every mark he made, but had the
delicacy of muscular action and steadiness of nerve to form the
letters so beautifully that they abide the test of the highest
magnifying power. They were, of course, written by microscopic
aid.

Now who believes that it does not require more genius and skill to
execute this minute work than it does to bore a Hoosac tunnel, or
build a Victoria bridge, or put a dam across the Connecticut, or
construct an Erie canal? I do not speak of the relative importance
of the great works and the small, but of the relative amount and
quality of the power that is brought to bear upon them. In a very
important sense the greatest thing a man can do is the most
difficult thing he can do. The most difficult thing a man can do
may not be the most useful, or in any sense the most important;
but it will measure and show the limits of his power. Work grows
difficult as it goes below a man, quite as rapidly as it does when
it rises above him. It costs as much skill to make a dainty bit of
jewelry as it does to carve a colossal statue. It actually costs
more power to make the chain of gold that holds the former, than
it does to forge the clumsy links by which the latter is dragged
to its location. Thus, whether man goes down or up, he soon gets
beyond the sphere of his power. The further he can carry himself
in either direction the more does he demonstrate his superiority
over the majority of men. The more difficult the task which he
performs the further does he reach toward infinity.

In the town of Waltham there is a manufactory of watches which I
have examined with great interest. It is here undertaken to
organize the skill which has been achieved by thousands of patient
hands, and submit it to machinery; and it is done. Every thing is
so systematized, and the operations are carried on with such
exactness, that, among a hundred watches, corresponding parts may
be interchanged without embarrassment to the machinery. The
different parts are passed from hand to hand, and from machine to
machine, each hand and each machine simply doing its duty, and
when from different and distant rooms these parts are assembled,
and cunning fingers put them together, every wheel knows its
place, and every pivot and every screw its home, though it be
picked without discrimination from a dish containing ten thousand.
Yet among these parts there are screws of which it takes one
hundred and fift

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