So, if there be a special Providence, it is a Providence to be trusted; and the man who believes in it has no apology for carrying a single unnecessary burden. This providence in all human affairs, is like the principle of vitality in the vegetable world. It does not release us from effort, in every legitimate and needful way, for the accomplishment of our laudable purposes; but when our efforts are complete, it takes care of the rest. What should we think of the farmer who could never roll the burden of his cornfield from his mind, and who, after hoeing his ground repeatedly, and cutting or covering every weed, should go night after night and sit up with it, and think of it, and dream of it all the while? He has done all there is for him to do, and beyond this he cannot control an hour of sunshine, a drop of dew, or a single cloud-full of rain. He cannot influence the law of growth in any particular. His field is in the control of a power entirely above and beyond him; and every thought he gives to it, after having done what he can for its prosperity, is utterly useless. It is his business to trust. Having done what he can, the remainder is in the hands of Him who feeds the springs of being with light and heat and moisture. It is thus that man's affairs grow while he sleeps. The hand that ministers to every plant will not fail to minister to him for whose use the plant was made.

Why do not men trust in Providence? Simply because, in their usual moods and in their usual circumstances, they do not believe in it. There is no other explanation. You, my friend, who carry your burdens around on your shoulders all the time, and who, perhaps, pray every morning and every night, do not believe in Providence. You do not feel that you can trust Providence. You assent to all that I say upon the subject, but, after all, your belief in Providence has no genuine vitality. You do not believe in it as you believe in the purity of your wife or the honor of your friend. You do not rely upon it for an hour. You do nod your head and say—"yes, yes;" and you think you are sincere; but you deceive yourself. So long as you persist in carrying your pack, which is a very unpleasant burden, as you know, you do not believe in Providence; else you would trust in it. You are tired and harassed by your daily labor; and it is very natural to suppose that if you could remove your burden each evening, and place it in the charge of one whom you believe would take care of it, you would do it with gladness. You fail to do it, and what is the natural conclusion? It is that your belief in Providence is a humbug. You believe in the honor of your friend, and you trust it. You believe in the honesty and ability of your creditor, and you trust him. You trust every thing and everybody that you firmly believe in; and the only reason under heaven why you do not roll off the burden that oppresses you, every day and every hour of your life, and commit it to the care of Providence, is, that you do not believe in Providence.

We are in the habit of talking about the world as a world of care, and speaking of human life as inseparably accompanied by trouble. This is, indeed, the truth; but if we were to remove from the world all its useless care, and take from life all its unnecessary trouble, they would be transformed into such bright and pleasant things that we should hardly know them. I know very few men and women who do not bear about with them care and trouble which God never put upon them, and which He has no desire to see upon their shoulders. It does not belong to them. It relates to things that are in the realm of Providence alone, or to things over which they have no control. The future is God's, but they voluntarily take it upon their shoulders, and try to bear it. They pluck a section of God's eternity out of His hands, and groan with the burden. They assume care which is not their own—which belongs to the Controller of their lives, and the Governor of the universe. It is care for that which is beyond human care—anxiety for that which anxiety cannot reach—trouble about that which we can neither make nor mend—that oppresses humanity. We can bear our daily burdens very well. We can go through our regular hours of bodily and mental labor, and feel the better rather than the worse for it; but to care for that which our care cannot touch, and to be troubled about that which is entirely beyond our sphere—this is the burden that breaks the back of the world—this is the burden which we bind to our shoulders with obstinate fatuity.



LESSON XXI.

PROPER PEOPLE AND PERFECT PEOPLE.

"I must have liberty Withal, as large a charter as the wind To blow on whom I please." SHAKSPEARE.

"They say best men are moulded out of faults." THE SAME.

"There's no such thing in nature, and you'll draw A faultless monster which the world ne'er saw." SHEFFIELD.

Nature calls for room and for freedom—room for her ocean and freedom for its waves; room for her rivers and freedom for their flowing; room for her forests and freedom for every tree to respond to the influences of earth and sky according to its law. Exceedingly proper things are not at all in the line of nature. Nature never trims a hedge, or cuts off the tail of a horse. Nature never compels a brook to flow in a right line, but permits it to make just as many turns in a meadow as it pleases. Nature is very careless about the form of her clouds, and masses and colors them with great disregard of the opinions of the painters. Nature never thinks of smoothing off her rocks, and cleaning away her mud, and keeping herself trim and neat. She does very improper things in a very impulsive manner. Instead of contriving some safe, silent, and secret way to dispose of her electricity, she comes out with a blinding flash and a stunning crash, and a rush of rain that very likely fills the mountain streams to overflowing, and destroys bridges and booms, and cabins and cornfields. On the whole, though nature keeps up a respectable appearance, I suppose that, in the opinion of my particular friend Miss Nancy, she would be improved by taking a few lessons of a French gardener, and reading savage criticisms on Ruskin.

I have alluded to my particular friend Miss Nancy. Perhaps I ought to say, at starting, that Miss Nancy is a man, and that I use the name bestowed upon him by his enemies, because it is, in a very important sense, descriptive. Miss Nancy's boots are faithfully polished twice a day. His linen is immaculate; and the tie of his cravat is square and faultless. He never makes a mistake in grammar while engaged in conversation. He is versed in all the forms and usages of society, and particularly at home in gallant attention to what he calls "the ladies." He seems to have lost every rough corner, if he ever had one. In politics and religion, he is just as proper as in social life. The most respectable religion is his religion; and the politics that shun extremes are his politics. I think he is what they call a conservative. At any rate, I newer knew him to do a rash or impulsive thing, or speak an improper word in his life. I think he is as nearly perfect as any man I ever saw.

But, after all, Miss Nancy is not a popular man. He will probably live and die an old bachelor, because all the women will persist in laughing at him. He is certainly good-looking, his dress is unexceptionable, his manners are "as good as they make them," and his morals are as proper as his manners; yet I have not yet seen the woman who would speak a pleasant word of my friend. He is decidedly a "woman's man," yet no woman will own him, and no woman feels comfortable with him. His language is so carefully guarded against all impropriety of style and structure, that she feels as if he were criticizing every word she utters, as well as measuring his own. His manners are so very proper that they are formal and constrained, and make her uncomfortable. His sentiments and opinions are so very conservative, that they have no vitality in them. With a curious perverseness, the most gentle and accomplished women will turn from him with a sense of relief, to join in the society of a hearty fellow with a loud laugh and a dash of slang, and a free and easy way with him. It may be difficult to explain all this, but it is true. An exceedingly proper man is never a popular man. That life which is controlled by rigid and unvarying rules, and regulated by conventionalities in every minute particular, and restrained in every impulse by notions of propriety, is unlovely and unnatural, and can never he otherwise.

The instincts of men are always right in this and all cognate matters. All formalism is offensive to good taste. The painter does not study landscape in a garden. Formal isles, closely-trimmed trees, rose hushes on the top of tall sticks, flowers tied to supports, vines trained upon trellises, lakes with clipped and pebbled margins and India-rubber swans—these are not picturesque. There is no more inspiration in them than there would be in a row of tenement houses in the city. The painter looks for beauty out where nature reigns undisturbed amid her imperfections,—where the aisles are made by the deer going to his lick; where the trees are never trimmed save by the lightning or the hurricane; where the rose-bushes spread their branches and the vines trail themselves at liberty; and where the lake looks up into the faces of trees centuries old, and hems itself in with thickets of alders and green reaches of flags and rushes, and throbs to the touch of the mountain breeze, while on its bosom

"The black duck, with her glossy breast Sits swinging silently."

A little child whose head is piled with laces and ribbons, whose dress is a mass of embroidery, and who is booted and gloved and otherwise oppressed by parental vanity and extravagance, is not picturesque, any further than its face goes. The portrait painter will cling to the face and let the clothes alone. All this I trickery of art, brought into comparison or contrast with the simple beauty of nature, is offensive. Yet a little beggar boy, with an old straw hat on, and with bare, brown feet, and a burnt shoulder which his torn shirt refuses to cover, would be a painter's joy. Here would be drapery that he would delight to paint, simply because there would be no formality about it. It is impossible for us to know how ridiculous a dress-coat is until we see it in a statue. We are obliged to put all our modern sages and heroes into togas and blankets and long cloaks in order to make them presentable to posterity.

We never find groups of accordant, striking facts like these—and their number could be largely increased—without finding that they are all strung together by an important law. All life demands room and freedom—freedom to manifest itself in every way, according to the law of its being and the range of its circumstances. All life is individual and characteristic, and comes reluctantly under the sway of outside forces. It is not natural to be proper, or to love propriety. In saying this I simply mean that it is against nature to bring one's individuality under the curbing and controlling hands of others—to make the notions of the world the law and limit of one's liberty, and to square every word and every act by arbitrary rules imposed by cliques and customs. A man who has been clipped in all his puttings-forth, and modelled by outside hands and outside influences, until it is apparent that he is governed from without rather than from within, is just as unnatural an object as a tree that has been clipped and tied and bent until its top has grown into the form of a cube. Thus the reason why Miss Nancy is not popular, and why the women refuse to delight in him, is, that he is not his own master—that he has, in himself, no independent life. It is not proper that he give utterance to his impulses;—so he suppresses them. It is not proper that he frankly reveal the emotions of his heart; so he conceals them. It is not proper that he enter enthusiastically into any work or any pleasure; so he is a constant check to the enthusiasm of others. It is not proper that he speak the words that spring to his lips when his weak sensibilities are touched; so he studies his language, and shapes his phrases to the accepted models. Thus is he shortened in on every side, until his individuality is all gone, and the humanity in him becomes as characterless as its expression. Every utterance of his life is made with a well-measured reference to certain standards to which he is an acknowledged slave.

A scrupulously proper man is often a self-deceiver, and not unfrequently an intentional deceiver of others. I do not say that he is necessarily a scoundrel or a fool. He may be very little of either, and he may be a little of both. These two words, which sound rather roughly, will give us, I think, a faithful index to his character. A man who is punctiliously proper has usually become so in consequence of an attempt to cover up his mental deficiencies or his moral obliquities. Punctilious propriety is always pretentious, and pretentiousness is always an attempt at fraud. A shallow mind is very apt to clothe itself with propriety as with a garment. A brain that cannot handle large things very often undertakes to manage a multiplicity of little things, and runs naturally into those minute proprieties of life which are showy, and which appear to the ignorant to indicate great powers and acquisitions in reserve. Most proper men are nothing but a shell, although many of them pass with the world for more. Their life is all on the outside, and is placed and kept there for show. We approach them, and very frequently find them so well guarded that we do not get a look into their emptiness for a long time. We examine them as we would a hillside strewn with fragments and planted with boulders of marble. We are obliged to dig to learn whether the signs we see are from an out-cropping ledge, or an outside deposition. Sometimes the plunge of a single question will reveal the whole story. A man with large brains and a large life in him has something to do besides attending to the notions of other people. He has at least no motive to deceive the world by striving to appear to be more than he is.

I have said that there are some men who are punctiliously proper for the purpose of covering their moral obliquities. The virtue of a prude is always to be suspected. "So you have been looking after the bad words," was savage old Dr. Johnson's reply to the very proper woman who found fault with him for introducing so many indecent words into his dictionary. There are few men who have not frequently, during their lives, broken their way through a crust of punctilious propriety into hearts full of all the blackness of sensuality and sin. The world is full of hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is nothing more than appearing to be what one is not. Indeed, I believe that one of the strongest motives operative in the world to render men scrupulously proper in their deportment and behavior is sin. I make no hesitation in saying that shallowness and sensuality are the leading ingredients in the majority of the exceedingly proper characters with which I am acquainted.

Leaving this particular phase of my subject, I wish to call attention to the well-recognized fact that all perfect people are bores. A perfect character in a novel has no more power over a reader—no more foothold among his sympathies—than a proposition in mathematics would have. Of all stupid creations that the brain of man has given birth to, there are none so stupid as the perfect men and women whom we find upon the pages of fiction. Sometimes we find in actual life a character so symmetrical, so rounded off at the corners, and smoothed at the edges, and polished on the sides, and unexceptionable in all its manifestations, that we cannot find fault with it; yet we find it impossible for us to love it. Such a character gets beyond the reach of our sympathies. Human affection is like ivy. It cannot cling to glass; it must plant its feet in imperfections. It is not to be denied that imperfection is the true flavor of humanity. The mind refuses to sympathize where it does not exist. What the world would call a perfect man—what would be adjudged a perfect man by the best standards—would be as tasteless as a last year's apple. A perfect woman could no more be loved than she could be hated. I never saw a man with a perfect face—a face modelled so symmetrically and so perfectly that no fault could be found with it—who was not more or less a numskull. A pretty man is always a pretty fool; and the more symmetrical the features of a woman are, the more does she approach to the style of beauty and expression and native gifts of a porcelain doll. The mind and the character can be so symmetrical that they will lose all charm and all significance. They descend into simple prettiness, which is simple insipidity.

I say that imperfection is the true flavor of humanity. In explanation, I ought to say that all individuality is either based upon it or pre-supposes it. For instance: the preponderance of certain powers and qualities of mind and character in me, over certain other powers and qualities, and the weakness and imperfection of these latter as related to the former, and to the individualities of others, make my individuality what it, is. If in me all mental and moral powers were in equipoise—if I were a symmetrical man, as the first Adam may possibly have been—I should have no individuality, no qualities that would distinguish me—no weaknesses that would furnish footholds for human sympathy—no freshness and flavor. A whole world full of perfect men and women, each one like every other, would be unutterably stupid. Where there is no weakness there is no individuality; where there is no individuality there is no true humanity; where there is no true humanity there is no sympathy; and where there is no sympathy there is no pleasure. We demand that a man shall live according to his law—develop himself according to his law— manifest and express himself according to his law; and then he will become the object of our sympathy or antipathy, according to our law. We demand that the true flavor of every individuality shall be declared, and not be masked by the imposition of conventional regulations.

If every tree in the world were perfect, according to any recognized standard, then all the trees would be alike, and would cease to be attractive and picturesque. We keep all perfect things out of pictures, because they are formal and tasteless. A bran new cottage, with a picket fence around it, and every thing cleaned up about it, is too perfect to be picturesque. An old, tumble-down mill, with rude and rotten timbers, and a wheel outside, is decidedly picturesque, because its imperfections make it informal. The most unattractive of all houses is a model house. A house that no man can find fault with, is a house that no man can love. It is precisely thus with human character and with men. A proper, perfect, "model" man, is an unlovable man. A sphere cannot be made to fit an angle, and a spherical character has no point of sympathy with one that is thrown into the angles necessary for individuality. So we neither love symmetry and perfection in men, according to any recognized standard, nor the appearance of them. We demand not only that men shall have individuality, but that they shall express it in their language and their lives. In society we demand variety; and in order to have it, men must act out themselves. The harmony and sweetness of social life consist in the adjustment of the strong points of some to the weak points of others.

With these facts so very evident as they must be to all thoughtful minds, it is strange that such an effort is made to bring all men to a certain standard and style of life. I do not believe there is a country on the face of the earth where public opinion and fashion and conventional and individual notions, exercise so despotic a sway as they do in America. There is, in this "free country," no play to individuality tolerated. No room is made for the peculiarities of a man—no freedom is given to his mode of manifestation. A man who has peculiar manners, and whose style of individuality is marked, has no room allowed to him at all. He is very likely to be called a fool, and laughed at by his inferiors. We take no pains to look through the outside to find the heart and soul, and refuse to see excellence behind manifestations that offend our notions or our tastes. We go to hear a preacher, and if he do not happen to have the externals, and the style of delivery which we most admire, we condemn him at once. We make no room for his individuality, and allow to it no freedom of manifestation. Room and freedom—that which the ocean has, that which the rivers have, that which the forest has, and that from which all of them derive their beauty and their glory—room and freedom are denied to men by men who need both, quite as much as their fellows.

The choicest food of the gossips is the personal peculiarities of their acquaintances. The grand staple of ridicule is this same individuality, whose importance I have endeavored to illustrate. All the small wits of society busy themselves upon the eccentricities of those around them. Church and creed, party and platform, fashion and custom, all direct themselves against the development of individuality. Sensitive natures shrink before such an array of influences, and retire into themselves, drawing back and keeping in check all their out-reaching individuality. Many a man, indeed, who would face a cannon's mouth without trembling, flinches when beset by ridicule. It is not the fault of society that the whole race of mankind are not reduced to a dead level of character, and a tasteless uniformity of life. Were it not that God does His work so strongly, it would have been undone long ago. As it is, we always have a few men and women who are true enough to God and themselves to keep the world from stagnation, and give zest to life. They sometimes shock Miss Nancy, but as they do not happen to care what Miss Nancy thinks of them, they manage to live and do something to keep Miss Nancy's friends from settling into chronic inanity.



LESSON XXII.

THE POETIC TEST.

"I walked on, musing with myself On life and art, and whether, after all, A larger metaphysics might not help Our physics—a completer poetry Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants More fully than the special outside plans, Phalansteries, material institutes, The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries, Preferred by modern thinkers." MRS. BROWNING.

The highest poetry is the purest truth. To learn whether any thing is as it ought to be, we have only to learn whether it is truly poetical. It is a popular fallacy to suppose that poetical things are necessarily fanciful, or imaginative, or sentimental in other words, that poetry resides in that which is both baseless and valueless. In the popular thought, poetry is shut out of the realm of truth and reality. The reason, I suppose, is, that poetry demands more of truth and harmony and beauty than is commonly found in the actualities of human life.

Let us suppose that in a country journey we arrive at the summit of a hill, at whose foot lies a charming village imbosomed in trees from the midst of which, rises the white spire of the village church. If we are in a poetical mood, we say: "How beautiful is this retirement! This quiet retreat, away from the world's distractions and great temptations, must be the abode of domestic and social virtue—the home of contentment, of peace, and of an unquestioning Christian faith. Fortunate are they whose lot it is to be born and to pass their days here, and to be buried at last in the little graveyard behind the church." As we see the children playing upon the grass, and the tidy matrons sitting in their doorways, and the farmers at work in the fields, and the quiet inn, with its brooding piazzas like wings waiting for the shelter of its guests, the scene fills us with a rare poetic delight. In the midst of our little rapture, however, a communicative villager comes along, and we question him. We are shocked to learn that the inn is a very bad place, with a drunken landlord, that there is a quarrel in the church which is about to drive the old pastor away, that there is not a man in the village who would not leave it if he could sell his property, that the women give a free rein to their propensity for scandal, and that half of the children of the place are down with the measles.

The true poet sees things not always as they are, but as they ought to be. He insists upon congruity and consistency. Such a life should be in such a spot, under such circumstances; and no unwarped and unpolluted mind can fail to see that the poet's ideal is the embodiment of God's will. The poet's Indian is very different from the real native American who has been exposed to the corrupting influences-of the white man's civilization. The poet insists on seeing in the American Indian a noble manhood, simple tastes, freedom from all conventionality, heroic fortitude, and all those romantic qualities which a free forest life seems so well calculated to engender. He looks upon the deep, mysterious woods, traversed by nameless streams; the majestic mountains, haunted by shadows; the broad lakes, swept only by the wind and the wild man's oar, and he says: "it is fitting, and only fitting, that out of such a realm should come such a life." Which is the better and the more truthful Indian—that of the poet, or he who drank the rum of our fathers and then scalped them? The poet's village is the model village, and the poet's Indian is the model Indian. Both are built of the best and truest materials that God furnishes, and we see that when the actual village and the real Indian are tried by the poetic standard, they are tried by the severest standard that can be applied to them. The poet's ideal embodies God's ideal of a village and an Indian.

The grand, basilar idea of American institutions is human equality—the idea embodied in the American Declaration of Independence, that men are created free and equal, each with an independent, and all with a co-ordinate, right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is in this idea the highest poetry, because it is the transcendent truth; and there is no true poetry this side of the highest truth. Poetry follows the universal law, and is dependent for its quality upon its materials. In the degree in which its materials are fictitious and artificial, is it poor and false. The Pilgrim's Progress is essentially better poetry than the Paradise Lost, because it contains more of the truth as it is in the divine life of man.

The poetic test, then, is practically a very valuable one, in all the important matters that relate to our life. Much of that which is miscalled poetry has been based upon arbitrary and artificial distinctions in human society and human lot. The poet has often sung of thrones and palaces, of kings and queens, of men and women of gentle blood, of barons and knights and squires, of retainers and dependents, of patricians and plebeians, and thus drawn his grand interest from distinctions in which God and Nature have had no hand. There may be romance, fancy, imagination, sentiment, and even instruction in such compositions as these, but there is no poetry. They have not in them the immortal life and the motive power of truth. We have only to carry distinctions thus attempted to be glorified to their logical results to land in the slavery of the masses to the over-mastering few. Now there never was, and there never can be, any poetry in slavery. Since time began no true poet has undertaken to write a line in praise of slavery. Poets have always been, and they must necessarily forever be, the prophets and priests of freedom. Multitudes of men have undertaken to justify slavery by the Bible, by expediency, by history, by necessity, by philosophy, by the constitution of the country; but no man ever undertook to justify it by poetry. The most brilliant prize offered by a national committee for the best poem in praise of human slavery, would not be able to draw forth a single stanza from any man capable of writing a line of true poetry. Philosophical defences of slavery can be purchased, political justifications can be had at the small price of a small office, and Christian apologies to order, but, thank God! not one line in praise of slavery could be written by a true poet, if the wealth of the world were to be his reward.

We have in the present age a sickly, sentimental humanity which is busily endeavoring to pervert the sense and love of justice in mankind. It regards the disposition to do wrong as a disease, to be treated with appropriate emollients applied over the heart, or some gentle opiate or alterative taken through the ears. It pities the murderer, and aims to give the impression to him and to the world that he is a victim to the barbarous instincts of society in the degree by which his punishment is made severe. It aims to transform prisons into comfortable asylums, where those who have been so unfortunate as to burn somebody's house, or steal somebody's horse, or insert a dirk under somebody's waistcoat, may retire and repent of their little follies, and in the mean time get better food and lodging than they were ever able to steal. Punishment—retribution—these are words which make them shudder. Nothing in their view is proper but such treatment of the criminal, be it soft or severe, as will contribute to his reformation. The criminal has forfeited no rights, and society has no claims upon him, if he only repents; and all punishment inflicted beyond the measure necessary to secure repentance is cruel. We have a great deal of this; and more or less it is modifying theological systems and vitiating public policy. It is carried to such an extent, often, as to make of the greatest criminals notable martyrs. Society and the victim of wrong-doing are both forgotten in sympathy for the wrong-doer.

Now these sentimental sympathizers with criminals, call themselves Christians, and are not willing to believe that any man can, in a truly Christian spirit, oppose their theories and their influence. They have been able to blind almost every sense in a man except the poetic sense; but to this they appeal in vain. "Poetic justice" maintains its purity. The reader of a novel, no matter how good or how bad he may be, demands that the villain of the book shall be punished as a matter of justice alike to him. and to those who have been his victims. Nothing but justice— nothing but a fitting retribution—will satisfy. The poetic instinct demands a perfect system of rewards and punishments, and is as little satisfied when a hero succeeds indifferently, as when a scoundrel fails to be punished according to his deserts. There is no poetic fitness without justice—retribution, pound for pound, and measure for measure. Set any audience that can be gathered to watching a play in which criminal and crafty art is made to meet and master a guileless spirit and pollute a spotless womanhood, and the sympathies of the vilest will follow the victim, and, in the end, demand the punishment of the victor. Nothing will seem to any audience so entirely out of place as kind and gentle treatment toward the artful brute, and nothing more outrageously unjust than the idea that repentance is the principal end of his punishment. The poetic instinct of fitness once thoroughly roused, as it is in a story, a poem, or a play, will be satisfied with nothing but full suffering for every sin. Now I would trust this poetic instinct of fitness further than I would all the sympathies of the humanitarians, all the sophistries of the philosophers, all the subtleties of the theologians, and all the milder virtues of Christianity itself. To me, it is as authoritative as a direct revelation from God, and is equivalent to it.

Again, nothing is more apparent in American character and American life than a growing lack of reverence. It begins in the family, and runs out through all the relations of society. The parent may be loved, but he is much less revered than in the olden time. Parental authority is cast off early, and age and gray hairs do not command that tender regard and that careful respect that they did in the times of the fathers. In politics, it is the habit to speak in light and disrespectful terms of those whose experience gives them the right to counsel and command. Young men talk flippantly of "fossils," and "old fogies," and wonder why men who have been buried once will not remain quietly in their graves. Of course, when such a spirit as this prevails, there can be no reverence for authority, no respect for place and position, and no genuine and hearty loyalty. We nickname our Presidents; and "old Buck" and "old Abe" are spoken of as familiarly as if they were a pair of old oxen we were in the habit of driving. Every man considers himself good enough for any place, and great enough to judge every other man. If a pastor does not happen to suit a parishioner, the parishioner has no feeling of reverence for him that would hinder him from telling him so to his face. Every man considers himself not only as good and as great as any other man, but a little better and a little greater. No being but God is revered, and He, I fear, not overmuch. What we call "Young America" is made up of about equal parts of irreverence, conceit, and that popular moral quality familiarly known as "brass."

It is the habit to applaud Young America—to magnify the superior wisdom and efficiency of young men, to treat old age familiarly, and to compel those of superior years to ignore the honors with which God has crowned them. "Every dog has his day," we say, and we are impatient of a man who declines to step into retirement the moment that his hair turns gray, to make room for some specimen of Young America with a snub nose and a smart shirt-collar. Now, however this irreverence may be justified—and it is not only justified but shamelessly gloried in—it is not poetical. Poetry cannot be woven of improprieties. A people bowing with reverence to those in authority, and regarding with profound respect high official station; a family of children clinging, even through a long manhood and womanhood, around the form of an aged parent with assiduous attentions and tender reverence; a community or a nation of young men looking to age for wisdom and for counsel; universal respect for years on the part of the young—these are, and must forever remain, poetical. Out of reverence can be woven the most beautiful pictures which the poet's brain can conceive; but Young America can no more excite poetic sentiment, or inspire poetic imaginations, than the sham Havana it smokes, or the mongrel horse it drives. There is no poetry in an irreverent character, or in an irreverent community. Irreverence in any form will not stand the poetic test.

Americans boast habitually of their country, and their boastings always assume the poetic form. The ballot-box that they talk about is the ballot-box that ought to be and not the ballot-box that is. One would think, to hear what is said of the ballot-box, that it literally shines with glory, so that every American freeman who marches up to it to deposit the paper embodiment of his will, glows like a God in its light, and grows godlike by his act. If we are to believe Mr. Whittier, the poor voter sings on election day:

"The proudest now is but my peer, The highest not more high; To-day, of all the weary year, A king of men am I.

To-day, alike are great and small, The nameless and the known; My palace is the people's hall, The ballot-box my throne!"

This is a very splendid sort of a ballot-box, and he is a very fine sort of an American who sings about it; but what are the facts? There are a good many chances that the box stands in a corner grocery, and that the poor voter is led up to deposit his priceless ballot so drunk that he cannot walk without help. Mr. Whittier would have us believe that the poor voter sings:

"To-day shall simple manhood try The strength of gold and land; The wide world has not wealth to buy The power in my right hand."

The truth is that gold and land try the very "simple manhood" as a rule, and very much less than the wide world is sufficient to buy the power in a great multitude of poor voters' hands. The poet sees what the ballot-box may be, ought to be, and, in some rare instances, really is. He unerringly seizes upon the dignity and majesty of self-government, the equal rights and privileges of manhood, and the dissipation of all distinctions in the exercise of the political franchise among freemen. The great truth of human equality inspires him, and he uses the ideal and possible ballot-box to illustrate it, and thus furnishes the standard by which the real ballot-box is to be judged.

The poetical view of our American system of government is that all men have a voice in the government; that we choose our own rulers and make our own laws; that no man has a hereditary right to rule, and that men are selected for the service of the people, in the construction and the execution of the laws, because of their fitness for office. Outside of this view, the American system of government has no beauty and no foundation in truth and justice. If we undertake to argue with a monarchist, we never bring forward any other. It has in it the essential element of poetry, because it does justice to the nature and character of man, and describes a perfect political society. The poetical view of the American system of government, is, then, the highest view. It covers the sovereignty of the citizen, and the wisdom of the popular voice. Around this idea the poets have woven their noblest songs; but again we ask what are the facts? The people are led by the nose by politicians; and not one officer of the government in one hundred is chosen to his place because of his fitness for it. The people do not nominate those who shall rule them, or those who shall make laws for them. Those whom the politicians do not nominate for office, nominate themselves. The political machinery of America practically takes the choice of rulers and officers out of the hands of the people, and puts it into the hands of a set of self-appointed leaders, whose patriotism is partisanship, and whose principal aim is to serve themselves and their friends, and use the people for accomplishing their purposes. No greater fiction was ever conceived than the pleasant one that the people of America govern America. The people of America, except in certain political revolutions, have always been governed by a company of self-appointed and irresponsible men, whose principal work was to grind axes for themselves. The poetry of American politics is then the severest standard by which to judge the reality of American politics.

Religious freedom is another poetical idea in which the American glories. It is essentially a poetical thought that every man is free to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience—that there is no Church to domineer over the State, and no State to domineer over the Church, that the Bible is free, and that each individual soul is responsible only to its Maker. This great and beautiful liberty stirs us when we think of it as music would stir us, breathed from heaven itself. It is grand, God-begotten, belonging in the eternal system of things, full of inspiration. This religious freedom we claim as Americans. Some of us enjoy it; but the number is not large. The freedom of the sect is not greatly circumscribed, but the freedom of the individual is hardly greater in America than it is in those countries where an established church lays its finger upon every man. I would as soon be the slave of the Pope or the Archbishop as the slave of a sect. I would as readily put my neck under the yoke of a national church as under the yoke of a sect. It does not mend the matter that the multitude are willing slaves, and it certainly mars the matter that the sects themselves do what they can, in too many instances, to circumscribe each the other's liberty. Sects are religiously and socially proscribed by sects. Take any town in America that contains half a dozen churches, representing the same number of religious denominations, and it will be found that, with one, and that probably the dominant sect, it will be all that a man's reputation and position are worth to belong to another sect. Perfect religious freedom in America there undoubtedly is; but it is the possession of only here and there an individual. Prevalent uncharitableness and bigotry are incompatible with the existence of religious liberty anywhere.

It is thus that the poetic instinct grasps at truth and beauty, and fitness and harmony, wherever it sees it, and it is thus that it furnishes us (subordinate only to special, divine revelation) with the most delicate tests of human institutions, customs, and actions. Litmus-paper does not more faithfully detect the presence of an acid than the poetic instinct detects the false and foul in all that makes up human life. All that is grand and good, all that is heroic and unselfish, all that is pure and true, all that is firm and strong, all that is beautiful and harmonious, is essentially poetical, and the opposite of all these is at once rejected by the unsophisticated poetic instinct.

Verily the poets of the world are the prophets of humanity! They forever reach after and foresee the ultimate good. They are evermore building the paradise that is to be, painting the millennium that is to come, restoring the lost image of God in the human soul. When the world shall reach the poet's ideal, it will arrive at perfection; and much good will it do the world to measure itself by this ideal, and struggle to lift the real to its lofty level.



LESSON XXIII.

THE FOOD OF LIFE.

"To the soul time doth perfection give, And adds fresh lustre to her beauty still; And makes her in eternal youth to live Like her which nectar to the Gods doth fill. The more she lives, the more she feeds on truth; The more she feeds, the strength doth more increase; And what is strength, but an effect in youth Which, if time nurse, how can it ever cease?" SIR J. DAVIES.

A horse can live, and do a good deal of dull work, on hay; but spirit and speed require grain. There is no self-supplied, perennial fountain within the animal that enables him to expend more in the way of muscular power than he receives in the way of muscular stimulus and nourishment. Food, in its quality and amount, up to the limit of healthful digestion, is set over against, and exactly measures, under ordinary circumstances, the quality and amount of labor of which a horse is capable. So, a cow can live on straw and corn-stalks; but it would not be reasonable to suppose that she would give any considerable amount of milk upon so slender a diet. We do not expect rich milk, in large quantities, to be yielded by a cow that is not bountifully fed with the most nutricious food. The same fact attaches to land. We cannot get out of land more than there is in it; and having once exhausted it, we are obliged to put into it, in fertilizers, all we wish to take from it in the form of vegetable growths. Wherever there is an outgo, there must be an equal income, or exhaustion will be the inevitable consequence.

The principle which these familiar facts so forcibly illustrate is a very important one, in its connection with human life. We cannot get any more out of human life than we put into it. All civilization is an illustration of what can be accomplished by feeding the human mind. All barbaric and savage life is an illustration of mental and moral starvation. The differences among mankind are the results of differences in the nourishment upon which their minds are fed. Eunice Williams, who was taken captive by the savages of Canada a hundred and fifty years ago, was the daughter of a most godly minister, of the old Puritan stamp; but a very few years of savage feeding made her a savage. Her mind was cut off from all other varieties of nourishment, and could only tend to savage issues. She kept a knowledge of her history, and many years after her capture revisited her home, accompanied by her tawny husband; but no persuasions could call her from her savage life and companionship. The conversion of men from heathenism to Christianity and Christian civilization is accomplished by introducing new food into their moral and mental diet. "A change of pastures makes fat calves," we are told; and any one who has noticed the effect upon an active mind of its translation from one variety of social and moral influences to another, will recognize the truth of the proverb.

If a man will call up his acquaintances, one by one, and mentally measure the results of their lives, he will be astonished to see how small those results are. He will also see that they are, under ordinary circumstances, in the exact proportion to the amount, and in correspondence with the variety, of the food they take in. It is astonishing to see how little it takes to keep some people, and how very little such people become on their diet. A man who shuts himself away from all social life, and lays by his reading, and declines all food that addresses itself to his sensational and emotional nature, and refuses that bread of life which comes down from heaven, and feeds himself only with relation to the accomplishment of some petty work, will become as thin and scrawny, mentally and morally, as the body of a half-starved Hottentot. It is the one curse of rural life that it does not have a sufficiency and a sufficient variety of food. The same scenes, the same faces, the same limited range of books, the same dull friends, exhausted long ago—no new nourishment for powers cloyed with their never-varying food—these are what make rural life, as it is usually lived, unattractive and most unfruitful. The fruits—the issues—of this life cannot be greater than the food it gets, and the food is very scanty. It is not necessary that it should be so, and sometimes it is not so; but the rule of common rural life is insufficiency of mental food, and consequent poverty of manifestation.

The utilitarian habits of New England, originating in necessity, and far outliving the circumstances in which they had their birth, have tended more than any other cause to make New England character unlovable. The saving of half-pence to add to one's store, and the denial to one's self and children of that which will delight the famished senses, and stir the thin emotions, and enlarge the range of experience, is the direct way of arriving at meanness of life. There are those who will not allow their families to cultivate flowers, because flowers are not useful, and they involve a waste of time and land. They will not have an instrument of music in their houses, because music is not useful, and it involves an expenditure of money, and the throwing away of a great deal of time. They will not buy pictures, because pictures are not useful, and because they cost money; so that many a rich man's parlor is as bare of ornament as a tomb would be. They will not attend a lecture, because, though it might furnish them with mental food for a month, it would not bring their shillings back to them. They will not attend a concert, because a concert is not useful. They will not hire a minister who possesses fine gifts—gifts that would enrich them mentally, morally, and socially—because they cannot afford it. So they take up with ministerial dry nursing, and one another's dry experiences, as spiritual food, in order to save a few more dollars.

There are a few of the severer virtues that will live upon a diet of this kind. Endurance, industry, a negative purity, thrift, integrity—these can live, and do live, after a sort, on a plain and scanty diet, and these, as we know, abound in New England. But generosity, hospitality, charity, liberality—all those qualities that enrich the character, and all those virtues that enlarge it and give it fulness and beauty and attractiveness, are always wanting among the class that sacrifices every thing for use. More cannot be got out of any life than is put into it. Modern chemistry analyzes soils, and ascertains exactly what they need to make them produce bountifully of any kind of grains and fruits. Wheat cannot be grown on land that does not contain the constituents of wheat; and if it be desirable to grow wheat, those constituents must be added to the soil. If any mental soil does not produce those vital manifestations and results which characterize a large, rich, and attractive life, then the constituents of that life must be introduced as nutriment.

One of the common experiences in the world of authorship is the writing of a single successful book, and the failure of all that follow it from the same pen. The explanation is, that the first book is the result of a life of feeding, and those that follow it come from an exhausted mind. There are many writers who, as soon as they begin to write, stop feeding, and in a very short time write themselves out. The temptation of the writer is to seclusion. His labors in a measure unfit him for social life, and for mingling in the every-day affairs of men. He is apt to become warped in his sentiments, and morbid in his feelings, and to grow small and weak as his works increase. The greatest possible blessing to an author is compulsory contact with the world—every-day necessity to meet and mingle with men and women—social responsibilities and business cares, and the consequent necessity of keeping up with the events and the literature of his time. An author in this position not only keeps a healthy mind, but he takes in food every day which his individuality assimilates to itself, and utters as the expression of its life. I have no belief that Shakspeare would ever have given us his immortal plays, but for the necessities which brought him so much into contact with men. Outside of his authorship, he lived an active, practical life—trod the boards of a theatre, managed men, looked after his money, rubbed against society in multiplied ways— and kept himself strong, healthy, and abundantly fed with that food which was necessary to him.

Shakspeare had genius, it is true, but genius without food is quite as helpless as a barren acre. All great geniuses are immense feeders. All true and healthy geniuses fasten for food upon every thing and every body. Their antennas are always out for the apprehension of ideas, and their mouths always open for their reception. Walter Scott was engaged in the active duties of the legal profession when writing his novels, and there was not a legend of Scotland, nor a bit of history or gossip, nor an old story-teller that lived within fifty miles of him, that he did not lay under tribute for mental food. It is declared, to the everlasting disgrace of Goethe, that he practiced upon the affections of women, even to old age, that he might gather food for poetry. Byron traversed Europe in search of adventure, and rummaged the scenes of legend and story for food for his voracious senses and sensibilities. His Childe Harold is nothing but the record of his tireless foraging. All men who have produced much have fed bountifully.

The writers are few in whom we do not notice something painfully wanting. We do not always understand what it is, but we know that, while we may accord to them good sense, and even genius, they fail to satisfy us. There is some good thing which they lack—something unbalanced and partial and one-sided about them. We presume that this is often the result of a constitutional defect, but in most instances it is attributable to insufficient nourishment in some department of their nature. "All but," is the appropriate epitaph for the tombstone of many an author; and if we look carefully into his history we shall find an answer to the question: "All but what?" We shall find, perhaps, that he is a recluse, that his social nature is not fed at all, and that be is, of course, unsympathetic. This is a very frequent cause of dissatisfaction with an author, as it always gives a morbid tinge to his writings. Dickens is eminently a social man, and eminently healthy and sympathetic. Possibly an author may starve his senses and become purely reflective, yielding up his points of contact with the outside world, and shutting the channels by which the qualities of things find their way to his mind. Not unfrequently a man's domestic affections may be starved, or ill fed, and if so, the fact is sure to be betrayed in his writings. And if a writer's religious nature be starved, it invariably vitiates all his characteristic works. No man who shuts out God and heaven from his life can write without betraying the poverty of his diet. If an author would write satisfactorily, touching all kinds of human nature and all sides of human nature, he must feed every department of his own nature, for he has nothing to give that he does not receive.

As in animal, so in mental life, there are gormandizing and gluttony, tending always to paralysis of voluntary effort. The devouring of facts, as they are found both in nature and in books, indulgence in social pleasures immoderately and constantly, pietism that feeds exclusively upon the things of religion, the feasting of the imagination upon the creations of fiction—all these are debilitating; and a blessed thing to the world is it that they unfit the mind for writing at all, as the overfeeding of the body unfits its organs for labor. Plethoric minds do not trouble the world with books, or with conversation, or with preaching. Activity simply demands food enough, and in sufficient variety, to feed its powers while operative, from day to day. This is the reason why immensely learned men have rarely done much for the world. Many of them have won reputations, like remarkably fat steers, for breadth of back and depth of brisket, but they are never known to move more than their own enormous bulks. Beyond a certain point of mental feeding, over and above the necessities of labor, the mind gets sleepy and clumsy.

I have alluded to authors, particularly, because, unlike the world in general, they give form and record to their life. The masses of men live as authors live, but their lives are not put down in books, so that the public may read and measure them. We will suppose that two men are fed upon the same diet. Each shall have sufficient food for his religious, social, esthetic, domestic, sensational, and emotional natures, yet only one of them shall embody in books the life which he draws from these varieties of nourishment. The other lives essentially the same life, but it fails of record. It may be as rich, and characteristic, in every particular, as that of the author, but it fails of artistic form because, perhaps, he lacks the peculiar mental gift required for its construction. So the real life of the author and the life of his reader may be the same, the one having advantage over the other in no particular, and the fact that one is embodied in artistic forms conferring upon it no essential excellence. What I have said about authors, therefore, applies to all mankind, engaged in whatever calling or profession. If any portion of any man's nature be not well fed, he will betray the fact in his life. Poverty of food in any particular will surely bring poverty of manifestation in that department of life which is deprived of its natural nourishment.

A familiar illustration of the failure of a life to secure its appropriate food, will be found in men and women who live unmarried. An old bachelor will sooner or later betray the fact that his finer affections are starved. It is next to impossible for him to hide from the world the wrong to which he is subjecting himself. His character will invariably show that it is warped and weak and lame, and his life will be barren of all those manifestations which flow from domestic affections abundantly fed. Here and there, one like Washington Irving will nourish a love transplanted to Heaven, and bring around him the sweet faces and delicate natures of women, to minister to a thirsting heart, and preserve, as he did, his geniality and tenderness to the last; but such as he are comparatively few. An old bachelor, voluntarily single, always betrays a nature badly fed in one of its important departments. So, too, those who marry, but who are not blest with children, betray the lack of food. Many of these hunger through life for children to feed their affections, and take on peculiarities that betray the fact that something is wrong with them. Some adopt children in order to supply a want which seems imperative, and others take pets of different kinds to their bosoms, ranging through the scale from birds to bull-dogs. It is a familiar trick of starved faculties and affections to take on a morbid appetite, and feed themselves on the strangest of supplies.

So, if a man would live a full and generous life, he must supply it with a full and generous diet. So far as his ability will go, he should make his home the embodiment of his best taste. There should be abundant meaning in its architecture. There should be pictures upon its walls, and books upon its shelves and tables. All the domestic and social affections should be abundantly fed there. His table should be a gathering place for friends. Music should minister to him. He should bring himself into contact with the great and wise and good, who have embalmed their lives in the varied forms of art. The facts that live in the earth under his feet, the beauty that spreads itself around him, and all those truths which appeal to his religious nature, are food which should minister to his life. An irreligious man—no matter what his genius may be—is always a starveling. An unsocial man can by no possibility lead a true life. A man's nature should be thrown wide open at every point, to drink in the nourishment that comes from the healthy sources of supply; and thus only may his life become abundantly rich and beautiful. I repeat the proposition that I started with: we cannot get more out of human life than we put into it.

There is another aspect of this subject that I have barely space to allude to. The illustration with which this article opens, touching the effects of hay and grain respectively upon the life of the horse, suggests that the food with which our bodies are nourished may have an important bearing upon our mental and moral life. Of this I have no doubt. Coarse food, made of material but feebly vitalized, makes coarse men and women. Muscular tissues not formed from choice material, brains built of poor stuff, nervous fibres to which the finest and most delicate food has not ministered, are not the instruments of the highest grade of mental life. The dispensation of sawdust is passed away. It is pretty well understood that the most complicated, the noblest, and the finest creature in the world requires the best food the world can produce; and that he requires it in great variety. If a man leads simply an animal life— eating, working, and sleeping—let him feed as animals do; but if he lives a life above animals, as a social and religious being, then let him take food that gives pleasure to his palate, and pluck and power to all the instruments of his mind. Hay may answer very well for a mind that moves at the rate of only three miles an hour; but a mile was never yet made "inside of 2:40" without grain.



LESSON XXIV.

HALF-FINISHED WORK.

"Ah God! well, art is long! And life is short and fleeting. What headaches have I felt and what heart-beating, When critical desire was strong. How hard it is the ways and means to master By which one gains each fountain head! And ere one yet has half the journey sped The poor fool dies—O sad disaster!" BROOKS' TRANSLATION OF FAUST.

Mankind are "nothing, if not critical;" and nothing would seem to be criticism with them but fault-finding. It is astonishing to see what a number of architects there are in the world—how many people there are who feel competent to give an opinion upon buildings in course of erection on the public streets. If a dwelling is going up, there is not a day of its progress in which its builder or architect is not convicted of being a fool, by any number of wise people who judge him on the evidence of a half-finished structure. When the dwelling is completed, it usually "looks better than they ever supposed it could;" but they learn nothing from this, though the proverb that "only fools criticize half-finished work" is a good deal older than they are. Every man who builds is obliged to take this running fire of fault-finding. Passing a new church recently, in the company of an architect, I asked him what he thought of the building. "I can tell better when the staging is down," was his reply. He knew enough not to criticize half-finished work, while probably a hundred men, knowing nothing of architecture whatever, had, during that very day, freely given their opinion of the building in the most unqualified way.

Did it ever occur to the reader of this essay that nearly all the judgments that are made up and expressed in this world relate to half-finished work? We hear a great deal of criticism indulged in with regard to American society. I have no doubt that this criticism is just, in a certain sense, but American society is only a half-finished structure. If it had arrived at the end of improvement and growth; if the elements which enter into it had already organized themselves in their highest form; if the creation of a high, refined, and beautiful society were not a thing of time; if such a society did not depend upon the operation of forces that require a great range of influences and circumstances, then the criticism might be entirely just; but it is as unreasonable to expect a high grade of social life in America, at this point of American history, as it is to expect perfection in a church before the carpenters get out of it, and the staging is down. Wealth, learning, culture, leisure—these cannot be so combined in this country yet as to give us the highest grade and style of social life. We are all at work upon the structure, and unless American ideas are incurably bad, and we are faithless to our duties, American society will be good when the work upon it is completed. No society is to be condemned so long as it is progressive toward a goodly completeness.

Men and women are always judging one another before they are finished. A raw boy, with only the undeveloped elements of manhood in him, is denounced as a dunce. A light-hearted, sportive girl, with an incontinent overflow of spirits, is condemned as a hoiden. Neither boy nor girl is half made. There is only the frame-work of the man and woman up, and it does not appear what they are to become. A young man is wild, and judged accordingly. It is not remembered that there are various modifying influences to be brought to bear upon him, before he will be a man. We see the bold outline of a new house, and we say that it is not beautiful. Soon, however, a piazza is built here, and a dormer is pushed out there, and gracefully modelled chimneys pierce the roof, and cornice and verandah and tower are added, until the structure stands before us complete in beauty, convenience, and strength. When we condemn a young man we do not stop to think that he is not done,—that there is a wife to place upon one side of him, and children to be grouped upon the other, and sundry relations to be adjusted before we can tell any thing about him at all.

There is nothing more common in experience and observation than the partiality felt by young and unmarried men for the society of married women, and the love of unmarried young women for the society of married men. I suppose that nearly every young man and young woman has a time of feeling that all the desirable matches in the world are disposed of, and that the marriageable young persons left are really very insipid companions. This is entirely natural, but exceedingly unreasonable. To expect a man to be as much of a man without a wife as with one, is just as reasonable as to expect a half-finished house to be as beautiful as a finished one. It is impossible for an unmarried man, other things being equal, to be as agreeable a companion as a married man; and lest I be suspected of a jest in this statement, I wish to assure my reader that I am entirely in earnest. Intimate contact with the nature of a good woman, in the relation of marriage, is just as necessary to the completeness of manhood, as the details of an architectural design are to the homely conveniences around which they are made to cluster. Every man is a better man for having children, and the more he extends those relations which grow out of the family life, the more does he open up to culture and carry to completeness the very choicest portions of his manly nature. It is natural, therefore, that the unmarried woman should become possessed of the notion that all the desirable men are married, and that the unmarried man should be the subject of a similar mistake with relation to the other sex. It must be remembered that men and women are made desirable by matrimony, and that half-finished work should not be subjected to any sweeping judgments.

Men and women are always turning out differently from what we expected and predicted they would. Men who have been laughed at and slighted during all their early life, become, quite to our surprise, very important and notable persons, and we are mortified to ascertain that we have been criticizing half-finished men. The college faculty give a diploma to some very slow young man, with great reluctance, but in the course of twenty years he completes himself, and when he comes back to honor them with a visit they make very low bows to him. All young people are pieces of unfinished work, to be judged very carefully, and always to be regarded as incomplete. We can say that we do not like their general style, as we would say that we do not like the style of an unfinished house. Grecian may not be to our liking, and we may prefer Gothic.

It seems to me that the Christian Church suffers more from the judgments of those who criticize unfinished work than any organized body of men and women. Here is an organization whose members do not pretend to perfection; whose whole theory forbids any such idea. They are disciples—learners of the Divine Master. They are members of a school in which none ever arrives at fulness of knowledge. Their prayer is that they may grow; and they know that if they have the true life in them they will grow while they live. If there is one thing in the world of which they are painfully conscious, it is that they are pieces of unfinished work. Some of the members are very much lower in the scale of completeness than others. In some there is only a confused pile of timber and bricks. In others only a part of the frame is up, or the walls are hardly more than begun. In others, perhaps, the roof is on. In comparatively few do we see the outlines all defined and the rooms in a good degree of completeness. In none of them is there a perfected structure, and none see and acknowledge their incompleteness more than those whose characters are farthest advanced toward perfection.

Now I put it to the world outside of the Christian Church to say if it has been entirely fair, and just in its judgments of the Church. Has it not judged Christianity by these imperfect disciples, and has it not condemned these imperfect disciples because they are not what they never pretended to be? Has it not criticized half-finished work, and condemned, not only the work, but Christianity itself, because this work was not up to the sample? It is very common to hear men say that such and such a Christian is no better than the average of people outside of the Christian Church, thus condemning the genuineness of his character because he is not a perfect Christian. A house is a house, even if it be only half-finished. At least, it is not any thing else; and as Christians cannot by any possibility be perfected on the instant, it follows that the large majority of Christians must be in various stages of progress—nay, that most of this large majority are not even half-finished. The Christian Church itself is a piece of unfinished work, and every individual member is the same. It is not pretended that either is any thing else. I never knew a Christian to set himself up as a pattern. So far as I know, they are very shy of pretension, and deprecate nothing more than the thought that anybody should take them for finished specimens of the work of Christianity in human life and character.

A sermon upon any important subject is always a piece of unfinished work. I once heard a famous preacher say that he could preach throughout his whole life on the text, "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," and even then have something left to say. The statement illustrates the many-sidedness of truth, and the multitude of its relations to the life of the individual and the world. Any sensible preacher knows that, within the compass of a single sermon, he can only present a single aspect of a great and important truth, yet he is criticized as if it had been expected that the work of a dozen volumes could be crowded into the utterances of half an hour. What is called an "exhaustive" sermon would exhaust an audience long before it would its subject. A sermon is only the dab of a brush upon a great picture, and if it gives a single striking view of a single great truth, it accomplishes its object. It must necessarily be an unfinished piece as regards its exposition of truth; and the same may be said of any essay on any subject. Every writer begins in the middle of things, and leaves off in the middle of things; and every thing he writes relates at some point to every thing that everybody has written. No man cleans up the field over which he walks, and leaves nothing to be said; and the best we do is unfinished work.

There are those who, in view of the sin and suffering which appear on every hand, are moved to impugn the goodness and love of Him who created the world by His power, and sustains and orders it by His providence. Millions are whelmed in the darkness of heathenism; other millions are bound by the chains of slavery; the oppressor is clothed in purple and fine linen; the beautiful and innocent are the victims of treacherous lust; children cry for bread beneath the windows of luxury; justice is denied to the poor by men who take bribes of wealth; and deceit circumvents and baffles honor. Such a world as this the critics condemn as a failure, which reflects alike upon the benevolence and power of its Maker; but these men have an eminent place among the fools who criticize half-finished work. If they could have witnessed the creation of the earth, and watched it through all the processes by which it was prepared for the reception of the human race, they would doubtless have been quite as critical as they are now, and quite as unreasonable. Suppose a man should visit his pear-trees in midsummer, and on tasting the fruit upon them, should condemn them and order them to be cut down and removed—how should we characterize his folly? He has criticized half-finished fruit, and made a fatal mistake. It is just as unreasonable to condemn a half-finished world as a half-finished pear. Human society must be brought to perfection by regularly instituted and slowly operating processes. It may take as long to perfect society as it did to create the world that it lives on; and God is not to be found fault with for the flavor of a fruit slowly ripening beneath the light of His smile and the warmth of His love, but not yet fully ripe.

Mr. Buckle has undertaken to write a history of civilization, or, rather, he has commenced to write an introduction to a history of civilization. His progress has not been great, and he doubtless realizes that he has undertaken a task which he can never finish. He will probably labor upon it while he lives, and then some other daring man will take up the thread where he will drop it, and go on until he in turn will be obliged to relinquish his unfinished task to a successor. When the work shall be finished, after its original design, it will doubtless be found to be antiquated. It undertook to organize a half-finished life—to reason upon forces that had only half revealed their nature and their power—to develop principles whose relations were imperfectly known. In short, it must necessarily prove to be a half-finished history of a half-finished civilization, whose every newly-opened event will throw a modifying light on all that shall have preceded it.

We have, therefore, but little finished work in this world. Not a finished character lives among mankind. No nation of the world illustrates a consummate civilization. All presentations of truth, of whatever nature and relation, are necessarily incomplete. Life is too short, comprehension too limited in its grasp, and expression too feeble or too clumsy, to allow the mind fully to organize, vitalize, and fill out to roundness and just proportion, a single creature of legitimate art. It is, therefore, literally true that the criticisms of the world are the judgments of the world's half-finished men on the world's half-finished affairs. Imperfection sits in judgment on incompleteness, and the natural consequence is that criticism, in whatever field of demonstration, is little more than a record of notions which assume to array themselves against other notions, which may be better or worse than those that oppose them.

It is with a depressing sense of the incompleteness of these lessons in life, that I now indite their closing paragraph. I cannot but be aware that the criticisms I have indulged in relate very largely to half-finished work, and I painfully feel that they are the product of a most imperfect judgment. If the reader has found them kind, charitable, hopeful—tending toward that which is good—and lenient toward human frailty, loyal to common sense, and faithful to virtue; if he has found in them that which leaves him a larger and a more liberal man—advanced in some degree toward that perfection which we are ever striving for, but which we never reach, then my aim has been accomplished, bid him God speed!

THE END.