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Metaphors, Similes

and other

Characteristic Sayings

of y

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

COMPILED FROM

DISCOURS ES

REPORTED BY

T. J. ELLINWOOD,

WITH INTRODUCTION BY

HOMER B. SPRAGUE, Ph.D,

New York :
ANDREW J. GRAHAM & CO.,

744 Broadway.
1895^

•I DEC 26.1 8<

7B4M4

Copyright, 1895,
By T. J. ELLINWOOD.

All rights reserved.

PREFACE.

This compilation is the first of a series of
booklets, or " handy volumes, " which it is pro-
posed to publish, of characteristic sayings by
Henry Ward Beecher, in various lines of thought,
such as abound in his public utterances, and such
as it is believed will, when arranged and issued
in a compact form convenient for use, be most
helpful to students, teachers, writers and speakers,
as well as entertaining and instructive to the
general reader.

Other volumes of this series are in course of
preparation, with the following titles: " Auto-
biographical Reminiscences ;-" " Biographical
Sketches ; " " Remarks on Preaching ; " " Rights
and Duties of Women;" "Advice to Young
People;" "The Management of Children;"
"Birds and Flowers;" "Pictures and Music;"
1 1 Miscellaneous Selections. "

Each chapter in the present volume bears the
same title as the discourse from which the ex-
tracts it contains have been taken.

4 PREFACE.

The admirable and rare likeness of Mr. Beecher
chosen for the frontispiece is now published for
the first time.

In selecting the materials for this book I have
had the advice and assistance of Dr. Homer B.
Sprague, whose personal acquaintance with Mr.
Beecher, and familiarity with the great preacher's
literary productions, and whose long experience
as an educator, author and lecturer, have been
such as to eminently qualify him for the work.

This little volume is offered to the public in the
earnest hope that its wholesome teaching will find
a lodgement in the hearts of those who may
peruse its pages, and aid and strengthen them in
their search for that which is highest and best.

T. J. Ellinwood.

Brooklyn, N. Y.,
Oct. 5, 1895.

INTRODUCTION.

Since the days of Shakespeare and Milton, it is
doubtful if any man has had by nature a more
nimble fancy, a more vivid imagination, a more
prolific creativeness, or more intense feelings,
than Henry Ward Beecher. To these qualifica-
tions of the orator were added strong common
sense, a subtle, contagious, and irresistible humor,
the most unflinching courage, and a deep and
tender sympathy with human wants and hopes,
joys and sorrows. These traits were ener-
gized by immense physical vigor, inherited from
his ancestors, and preserved by the strictest
temperance and careful bodily exercise. . The
writer used to meet him almost daily at the
Butler Health-Lift in Brooklyn, and to notice the
pains he took to maintain his vitality. His
magnificent physique carried him triumphantly
through labors and sufferings that would have
broken down a dozen ordinary men. The buoy-
ancy of perfect health and constant success im-
parted to his nature a joyousness which in turn

6 INTRODUCTION.

reacted upon his physical system, and made it
more elastic. His body was an instrument of
the finest and strongest quality, perfectly respon-
sive to the soul within. To crown all, there
appeared to be in him a genuine consecration to
the service of God and Humanity.

He had a marvelous command of language,
evidently improved by careful reading and fre-
quent use of the dictionary. A voice pleasant,
though not melodious, firm in its fibre, sometimes
gentle and tender, often manly and penetrating —
varying in force and quality rather than in pitch
or volume — noted for the initial rather than the
median " stress" — not managed with such skill
as that of O'Connell, or Wendell Phillips, but
always under control — sometimes thrilling and
tremendous in its intensity, and ringing in the
ears long after the sermon was done — a voice
never to be forgotten by those who heard him in
his moments of highest inspiration — completed
the outfit of this extraordinary man.

In his youth and early manhood he had some
drill in elocution and gesture, and its effects were
visible in his postures whenever he took the plat-
form to speak. He practiced but little art, and
there was no attempt to conceal it — as was so
successfully done by Phillips, who usually threw

INTRODUCTION. 7

his audiences off their guard by a studied
negligence at the outset of his speeches ; or by
John B. Gough, who was ingenious in disarming
his critics, as when he would say, at rising, "I
wish to make a few remarks before I begin to
speak," and then, while the audience were smiling
at the Hibernicism, the preliminary u remarks"
would suddenly flame and dazzle like blinding
lightning. Beecher often took the attitude which,
perhaps, the elocutionist Lovell had taught him,
but which had become second nature, and grace-
fully maintained it till his feelings or fancy made
him forget himself. Then he unconsciously be-
came more or less imitative in his delivery, or
allowed himself to be carried away by his fervor,
till, as was said of his father, he u thundered and
lightened all around the horizon." He always
imagined himself in the midst of what he was
describing, a participator, or at least a sym-
pathetic spectator, of the scene ; and his gestures
of unconscious imitation made the pictures as
realistic as the most consummate actor could
have done. Then came the u torrent, tempest,
and whirlwind of passion," sweeping all before
it.

He was not a perfect master of style. Passages
of exquisite beauty and startling power abound

8 INTRODUCTION.

in his sermons ; but he was as careless as Shake-
speare, plunging into the midst of a thought and
beginning to formulate it without the slightest
idea how his language would turn out, or how
the sentence might end. Apparently he did not
very carefully arrange the topics of his discourse
with a view to artistic effect. He had no time
for that. He never studied the trick of climax.
Had he spoken only half as often, or not more
than two-thirds as long, and concentrated his
efforts to make each discourse more perfect as a
work of art, the effect would have been greater
and more lasting. Had he elaborated his ser-
mons as Barrow, South, Bossuet, Chalmers,
Bushnell, Robertson, and some others did, more
of them would have been immortal. So essential is
form. Nothing slipshod goes down to posterity.

Had he carefully trained himself in the art of
verse-making, as Milton did, and had his ear
been as delicate, he might have become a great
poet. But he never studied rhetoric much, nor
verse-making at all.

His imagination, however, was Shakespearian.
No other man's in these modern times has been
more inexhaustibly fertile.

"For rhetoric he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope ! "

INTRODUCTION. 9

In the use of figurative language, the similarity
between him and the great dramatist is remark-
able. Analogies innumerable, resemblances by
the hundred, intuitions of inner meanings which
never occur to the ordinary intellect, make these
master minds art galleries full of portraits, statues,
reliefs, scenes and scenery ; and suddenly resem-
blance becomes identity, marble warms with life,
pictured eyes sparkle, painted lips break into
speech, the ideas are persons. The tongue cannot
keep pace ; the images come so swift that they
blend in mixed metaphor.

Bacon had the ingenious imagination, but not
the ardent heart of these men. His soul was an
iceberg, glittering but cold.

Burke tells us that a truly fine sentence or
paragraph will contain a striking thought and
corresponding sentiment, the whole made doubly
striking by the force and beauty of figurative
expression. His description of Marie Antoinette
is a good illustration.

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the
Queen of France, then the Dauphin ess. at Versailles ; and
surely never lighted upon this orb, which she hardly
seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just
above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated
sphere which she had just begun to move in, glittering like
the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy ! "

10 INTRODUCTION,

So Beecher's tremendous defiance of the Fugi-
tive Slave Law, at the time when great northern
statesmen were counseling that it be " obeyed
with alacrity."

"But as to those provisions which concern aid to
fugitives — may God do so to us, yea, and more also, if we do
not spurn them as we would any other mandate of Satan !
If, in God's Providence, fugitives ask bread or shelter,
raiment or conveyance at my hands, my own children
shall lack bread ere they ; my own flesh shall sting with
cold ere they shall lack clothing : and whatsoever defence
I would put forth for my own children, that shall these
poor, despised, persecuted creatures have at my hands and
upon the road. The man who would do otherwise, who
would obey this law to the peril of his soul and the loss of
his manhood, were he brother, son, or father, shall never
pollute my hand with grasp of hideous friendship, nor cast
his swarty shadow across my threshold."

It may be well to note the process, to glance
into the laboratory. In a happy moment, a man
of acute discernment might say with Hamlet,
" There's nothing good or bad but thinking
makes it so." A truth of vast importance is here
involved. Add a picture, and you wonderfully
adorn and enforce the thought. Thus with
Milton,

" The mind is its own place, and itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

Here we have two of Burke's constituent
elements. Let us add the third, the striking

INTRODUCTION. 11

sentiment. Thus in Shakespeare, Hamlet's uncle,
the guilty king, comparing his soul to a feeble
bird caught with bird-lime, its feet sinking deeper
and deeper the more it struggles to disengage
itself from the sticky substance, exclaims in his
distress :

" 0 wretched state ! 0 bosom black as death !
O lime'd soul, that struggling to be free
Art more engaged ! "

So the following from Milton. It is Satan's
agony of remorse :

" Me miserable ! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair ?
Which way I fly is hell ! Myself am hell ! "

It might seem that we had reached the acme.
No, there is another step ; the blended thought,
image, and passion give rise to personification.
Thus:

" Which way I fly is hell ! Myself am hell !
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven ! "

Take this from Shakespeare, who excels all
others in the frequency and felicity of this fused
thought, sentiment, imagery, and personification,

12 INTRODUCTION.

though the union is not, as Richard Grant White
alleges, peculiar to Shakespeare :

"Night's candles are burned otit, and jocund day-
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top ! "

Or this :

11 Within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp."

So Beecher starts with a great truth, and a
deep feeling. An apt picture flashes through his
mind, and he incorporates it. Ere he is aware,
the fusing heat blends thought, passion, picture,
in glowing personification — a four -fold combi-
nation— and the product becomes truly Shake-
spearian.* A single paragraph, which we happen

* Professor Ellinwood, Mr. Beecher's authorized reporter
for thirty years, writes me: "I once heard Mr. Beecher
say, in regard to the figures by which, in speaking, he
illustrated his subjects, that often they crowded upon his
mind in such multitudes that it was only a matter of
choice which he should use. In reporting his discourses,
I noticed that now and then he would drop one figure
unfinished, and substitute another for it. He said, in
explanation, that not unfrequently, while presenting an
illustration, another, better suited to his purpose, would
pass before his mental vision."

INTRODUCTION. 13

to light upon in the peroration of his sermon of
Sunday morning, Jan. 24, 1886, will sufficiently
illustrate these points and the spirit of the man.

"The banners fly, and whoever is for the Lord must
come and enlist under the banner of Christ Jesus. Do not
sneak and hide, and, because you are relatively imperfect,
refuse, through misinterpreting pride, to join the Church
of Christ. Join little, big, fine, coarse, ignorant, knowl-
edgeable ! It takes all kinds of men, put together, to
make that mighty representation of Christ in the Church.
Not for my sake, not even for your own sake, do I call you,
though there are eternities in your case ; but for Christ's sake,
and for the sake of this poor staggering world, that still groans
and travails in pain until this day ! — for these high and noble
sakes, I appeal to every young man, to every maiden, to
every man and every woman — on which side are you in this
mighty conflict that is going on in heaven and earth and to
the grand close? Choose ye this day which side you will
take ! And may God help you."

Homer B. Sprague.

East Orange, N. J.,
October 4, 1895.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface - 3

Introduction 5

Contents --------- 15

I. Patience -------- 17

II. Natural Laws Moral and Moral Laws Natural 27

III. Disinterested Benevolence - 31

IV. What Men will do for Money - 37
V. Fruitfulness of the Human Mind - 47

VI. Patient Waiting 59

VII. Laying up Treasures _ - _ - 69
VIII. Remote and Permanent Eesults 81
IX. Activity Indispensable to Normal Develop-
ment 91

X. The Law of Feeling 103

XL The Administration of Wealth - 115

XII. Dangers of Familiarity with Evil - - 123

XIII. The Law of Human Development - - 133

XIV. Sorrow and its Dangers - 143

2

16

CONTENTS.

PAGE

XV. The Employment of Time - - - - 149

XVI. The Uses of Feeling 157

XVII. Work 165

XVIII. Unconscious Selfishness - 173

XIX. Personal Influence 183

XX. Power in Man to Overcome Evil - - 191

XXI. Plans in Life 197

XXII. Motives for Action 201

XXIII. Self-Government 207

XXIV. Generosity and Benevolence - - - 213

PATIENCE

I.

PATIENCE.

Many men who are impatient are a great deal
more patient than some who are far more patient
than they — if you can untangle the knot !

When you take a man that is constitutionally
healthy and joyous, and not over-sensitive, and
put him through a course of troubles, he scarcely
feels them. To him they are nothing, because
they strike on leathery skin, upon a resilient
and buoyant nature, and bound off from him
without causing him to suffer. But if you take
another man who has no skin, so that his nerves
lie on the outside, and put him in the same
situation, every particle of dust that touches him
causes him intense pain. The former may not
speak a hasty word through the long day ; but he
deserves no credit, because there is no hasty
word that he wants to speak. There may not be

20 METAPHORS AND SI2IILES.

an hour of the day in which the latter does not
want to speak a hasty word ; and yet he may so
far control his impulses as to refrain from speak-
ing it ; and he is deserving of great credit.

Suppose a man should take a babe and lay it
down to sleep by the side of a crocodile, in a
place that was infested by mosquitoes and gnats
and sand flies ; and suppose when the child,
bitten by these insects and suffering with pain,
waked up and began to fret and cry, the crocodile
should say, 1 1 My dear child, what is the matter ?
Why are you so irritable ? I do not feel any-
thing. I can keep my patience." Many men
are covered with thick shells, and are good
natured because nothing hurts them. Such men
ought not to be censors of those who suffer
acutely at every pore.

It is in the silent battle-fields, in the obscure
and hidden places of the soul's experience, that
God looks for his martyrs and heroes. There are
now and then heroes that are disclosed and
obvious to men \ but the time will come when the
most illustrious heroes of the world will be sought

PATIEXCR 21

for among men who took their lives in their hand
for a great truth or principle, made themselves
exiles on earth, disrobed themselves of honors,
and gave up the ordinary privileges of gaining
profit and pleasure, such as most men crave.
Men and women who stand in their humble
spheres to do great deeds of self-renunciation,
and bear suffering for others, with no hope of
reward except that which inevitably follows right
conduct, are true heroes.

Patience implies willingness and ability to bear
suffering for some good reason. That is to say,
it is self-command. It is saying to the stronger
parts of a man's mind, when the weaker parts
are suffering, "Go to their help." It is saying
to a man's conscience, when he is suffering in a
lower feeling, "Go to the rescue of that lower
feeling ; give your strength to it ; intone it ;
hold it up."

When suffering first comes, it seeks to spring
upon the mind, or upon some faculty of the
mind, and ride it ; and there is power given
to a man deliberately to take suffering off

22 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

from that faculty, and put it under his feet. It
may lacerate and tear ; but there is a power to
hold it in its place, and wait, with smiles and con-
tentment, until its office work is done, and it
passes away.

Many men, though they are not afraid of
suffering, dodge it, hide from it, coy with it ; but
he that finds coming upon him suffering of any
kind, whether of body or soul, high or low, and
knows how, by a feeling, complex or simple, to
bravely carry it, and not be imbruted nor
adumbrated by it, is a man that exercises
patience. To have an ache, a grief, or a sorrow,
and endure it, and still keep every part of the
mind acting harmoniously and sweetly and vic-
toriously— that is to be patient.

We have glimpses and fragmentary experiences
of this glorying of the higher nature over the
infirmities of the lower. Where it becomes a
habitual state of mind, one is not far from being
perfect. When a man can let troubles fall upon
him thick and fast, morning, noon, and night,
and triumph over them, he lacks nothing.

PATIEXCE. 23

One by mighty patience is able to endure the
strokes of fear, and another endures them be-
cause he does not feel them. The nature of the
latter is such that he is not susceptible to fear.
The very first element of patience, therefore, is,
that you do care for things, and that you do feel
their edge or point.

True patience always sees, or believes in, some
benefit to arise from bearing trouble. In other
words, it is a moral exchange, suffering being the
price that one pays for a greater good to be en-
joyed by-and-by. The coin which we give for
higher elevation is iron, and hard to circulate ;
but the product is golden. Suffering is that which
turns everything it touches into gold. It is the
philosopher's stone that transmutes to a higher
form all that is low and groveling in us.

One may put forth a hundred times as much
courage and zeal as another, and yet not succeed
in controlling his temper as well as that other.
There is many a man that builds fort after fort-
over against a temptation without being able to
protect himself from it, while his neighbor makes
no effort to shield himself from it and yet is not
harmed nor annoyed by it.

24 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Some there are who will never have less than
the whole of that which is to be made out of their
troubles ; but there are others who have learned
every day to dust the garments of their soul as
they do the garments of their body. People do
not usually collect all the dirt they can find on
their hat and boots and coat, and save it : they
usually brush it off, sweep it out-of-doors, and are
glad to get rid of it ; and yet, men are slow to
forget the little speeches that have been made
about them ; the little wrongs that have been
done them ; the little conflicts they have had
with each other ; the little frets and annoyances
of life. They ponder over them, and make the
most of the suffering they are able to extract
from them.

It is a great thing for a man to be magnani-
mous— to carry himself with a spiritualized good
nature when he is perplexed, picked at, pierced,
and wronged. It is a great thing to bear up
under one's suffering, and not think of it. I love
to see a great nature, not that is insensitive to
troubles, but that has trained himself so that he
meets them as in winter a man wraps his cloak
about him, and goes through the snow-storm

PATIENCE. 25

without thinking of it. After a little experience
a man maj^ come to that state in which he can
shine down these things.

We carry great heaviness of spirit, often, which
holds us down. Sometimes we have aspirations,
and would fly ; but we are like birds that are in
cages, and cannot fly.

The world at large is not made to meddle with
the delicacies of love ; and in every nature there
is a vast realm of silence where, if patience be
not found, woe be to it ! But if patience does
gain victories there, perfection is not far off.

NATURAL LAWS MORAL

AND

MORAL LAWS NATURAL.

II.

NATURAL LAWS MORAL AND MORAL LAWS NATURAL.

A man may do things which are not forbidden
by his fellow-men, but which are forbidden by the
way in which he is made. There is no law
against a man's reading at untimely hours. Yes,
there is. Where is the statute book in which
that law is written ? In the ball and nerve of
the eye. God wrote it there.

There is no law that a man must not eat indi-
gestible food. Yes, there is. Was it proclaimed
from Mount Sinai ? No. Your stomach is your
Mount Sinai for such a law as that. Transgress
it and see.

Men seem to think that while natural laws
will certainly strike, moral laws will not. Yes,
they will.

30 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

You are a violator of natural law ; and it
makes no difference that the transgression of
each day is so minute, for a thousand minute
transgressions, like a myriad of snowflakes, form
an avalanche that carries the power of God. A
snowflake seems to be the sign of weakness, that
comes wavering through the air, uncertain
whether it will fall or fly ; but let snowflakes
accumulate in vast heaps upon the mountain side,
and when they break away you have a mani-
festation of the power of these minutiae.

DISINTERESTED BENEVOLENCE

III.

DISINTERESTED BENEVOLENCE.

If one declares that there is no person living
who does not lie, he confesses himself to be a liar.
He who declares that there is not a pure nature
on earth, asserts his own impurity. The pos-
sibility of the existence of the quality of goodness
may be recognized by very wicked men. It is
the faith of a man in the quality of goodness or
unselfishness which indicates the existence of
that quality in himself. Our hope that there will
be a higher style of benevolent action rests on the
almost universal faith that there is the possibility
of it. When I hear a man say that all men, and
all women too, are corrupt, always and all through,
I make up my mind that there is no hope for him.
A man who does not believe in goodness cannot
be good. If a man smells corruption in every-
body, he has it in himself. When, therefore, I
hear young men or maidens decrying disinterested
benevolence, I feel that unless they are mistaken

34 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

in the definition of the quality, the only remedy
in their case is regeneration or death.

You shall not find a single man in history that
has been canonized by the hearts of the people,
who was not supposed to be disinterested in
benevolence. There have been ten thousand men
who were heroes by reason of courage, but who
have sunk out of sight. A man may have wisdom,
capacity and bravery, but he does not become a
hero that generations embalm and refuse to let
die, unless he is supposed to have acted from
disinterested considerations.

In the matter of disinterested benevolence, all
you can demand is, that benevolence shall be the
dominant faculty, leading and controlling the
other faculties, and being the real mainspring of
the feeling which produces the course of action.

The constitution of the world is such that
benevolence is the best interest of every man ; it
is the royal road to individual as well as social
happiness ; and when a man acts from an inspira-

DISINTERESTED BENEVOLENCE. 35

tion of good- will to others, he says, "That is the
way to make myself happy." He knows it ; but
that is not the reason why he performs the act.

Intrinsically, disinterested benevolence is de-
lightful. It is the action of the mind in its
highest state and purest harmony.

When our higher nature undertakes to act, and
our passions rise up against it, they are to be put
down, with pain and crucifixion even, if it need
be.

Self-denial is always painful in the resisting
part of our nature, but never in the directing
part.

True disinterested benevolence is, in and of it-
self, joyful. It is less than that only by reason of
the mixture of our motives, and of the low estate
in which we live in this world. As we are truly
developed, and as we go up in the scale of being,
our virtues become purer and more perfectly
resonant with joy.

36 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

The most selfish men, and the men who believe
least in disinterestedness, long to find somebody
that is unselfish ; and when there is found a man
who seems to act not for himself but for his
fellows, all men bow down to him, worship him,
and call him divine.

There is something in men which longs to see
essential kindness. Though they do not see much
of it, for the reason that there is not much of it to
see, they are always drifting about it, and supply-
ing by the imagination what is lacking, that they
may have this conception in a concrete form. The
human heart longs to see, not in God alone but in
men, the attainment of this heroic quality of true,
disinterested benevolence ; and no man, I think,
believes in any human quality the germs and pos-
sibilities of which are not in himself.

WHAT MEN WILL DO FOR MONEY.

IV.

WHAT MEN WILL DO FOR MONEY.

It is no time to say that man cannot, in
civilized society, be guilty of cannibalism. I tell
you there are more cannibals in New York than
in the isles of the Pacific ! and if to-day you were
suddenly to take away the support that comes
from eating men, there would be thousands and
thousands of empty maws to-morrow in that city !

There are multitudes of sewing and laboring
women who are driven down to a point of poverty
beyond which one single step is starvation, and
starvation is the door of heaven in comparison —
damnation ! Into that, with utter indifference and
remorseless greed they are thrust, as sheep are
thrust into the shambles for butchery.

There are dens and orgies. Nothing this side

40 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

of hell can equal myriads of these places. We do
not need to go to Vesuvius to see volcanoes. We
have them all around us, in spite of the police
and the common sense of the community.

There is nothing more patent and nothing more
melancholy than that a man will make money out
of his fellow man — literally, out of his blood and
bones — if he can. There is no measure of cruelty,
no depth of wickedness, no degree of meanness,
that men will not come to practice for the sake of
getting money — I hope at first with scruples and
reluctances, but at last without sensation or
delicacy. There is nothing gigantic in fraud,
nothing base and treacherous and heartless, that
men will not do for the sake of realizing pelf.

If you take the treatment of emigrants that
land on our shores ; if you consider the deliberate
deceptions, the fleecings, the overwhelming ruin
brought upon families ; if you call to mind their
beggary, and what is worse, their compulsory
degradation ; if you cull from mute lips histories,
now suppressed and unknown, of unutterable
anguish suffered by those who cannot speak the

WHAT HEX WILL DO FOB MOXEY. 41

tongue of the land to which they have come ; if
you understand that these things are reduced to
a business, and are carried on by men who care
neither for tears, for anguish, for separation, nor
for the deep damnation that they heap on the
victim's head, you cannot doubt that men will do
anything for the sake of money.

The testimony respecting the treatment of
sailors, the lairs and dens into which they are
enticed, the outrages they suffer, the utter
abominations of inhumanity that from year to
year remain unexplored and untouched, is one of
the most prolific chapters of bottomless lust and
avarice.

Strangers that sojourn in our midst find them-
selves watched for, as men watch for game in the
woods. The trapper does not more cunningly
spread his snares for game than does the gambler
and soul-destroyer set his traps for men — and
with no desire except their destruction and a
little temporary gain.

42 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

A man, if he is stripped of his possessions, can
repair the damage. If he is thrown down to-day,
he may be on his feet again to-morrow. There
are endless resources open to a man. But a
woman — what can she do ?

You cannot tell by the way a tree looks, whence
its roots are sucking sap. There is many a man
that wears clean linen, and has good associates,
and appears regularly at the house of God, and
sits down at the communion table, and munches
his bread, and drinks his wine, and seems to be a
Christian man, who, if you follow down his roots,
you will find to be drawing his nourishment from
the common sewers.

Vice is a corruption, not of morals simply, but
of property as well. It is not merely a burden to
its victims, but it is destructive to the whole
community. It is a taxgatherer and oppressor.
It wrongs the poor, it wrongs those who are next
to the poor, it wrongs those who are next to them,
it wrrongs you, it wrongs me, it wrongs every-
body.

WHAT MEN WILL DO FOR MONEY. 43

It is true respecting the whole enlightened
community that the interests of virtue and what-
ever promotes virtue are a good investment, and
that whatever destroys virtue in the end injures
property.

Palaces of pleasure there are where death is
double-edged. Hundreds and thousands are
traveling in ways which are called ivays of
pleasure, but which are ways of damnation ; and
there is a great deal of capital invested in them.
These haunts of miscalled pleasure are winked at
and encouraged by thousands and thousands
besides those who are known to be directly re-
sponsible for them. If it were not for what may
be called respectable hypocritical capitalists they
could not exist as they do.

Whenever it is proposed to maintain public
order, and put down public ruin and disgrace,
the air is full of cries of men about the violation
of their liberty and their rights ! What are such
men as these doing but standing at the bloody
crank of the huge mill into whose hopper are
thrown men and women and children, as they

44 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

grind them up to make money out of their blood
and substance ?

Ten thousand wretched hearts have sighed, and
sorrowed, and prayed to God, saying, "Lord, why
has my babe died ?" It was killed by foul milk,
drawn from the foul udders of foul animals, that
were fed to disease, fever and rottenness ! And
there are men who go on furnishing the com-
munity with such milk, just because there is
money made by it.

Do you suppose the men who are adulterating
food, and corrupting the staff of life, do not know
that they are spreading sorrow and trouble and
mischief ? They know it perfectly well ; but they
do not care. They are making money, and that
is the main thing to their thought. All human
comfort, and life itself, put into one scale, with
money in the other, do not weigh a particle so
far as they are concerned.

The great battle between the lower passions
and the higher passions has been going on from

WHAT MEN WILL DO FOB MONEY. 45

the beginning of the world down to our day, and
is to go on, not less but more fiercely, to the end.

The ground-work of to-day is a positive, and
not merely a negative one. We are to take our
stand in the conflict between right and wrong,
and struggle for the right. Citizens should
clearly understand the nature of those disturb-
ances which bubble up now and then in human
affairs. No man has a right to be indifferent to
good and evil ; and you cannot but choose one or
the other. Which will you choose ?

All true citizens should be taught to unite in
securing the triumph of purity, right and humanity
in our struggles. The time has come when good
men are in such numbers that, if they will cast
aside inferior issues, and turn their hearts to
great moral ends, there is no question but that
these cities may be controlled, purified and lifted
up ; and I think there is no triumph that would
be more illustrious.

I do not object to sending missionaries to India.

4:6 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Every missionary sent abroad leavens the mis-
sionary spirit at home. I sympathize with, and
urge, the sending of missionaries to the islands of
the sea ; but while they are attacking remote
heathenism, there is a Juggernaut in our midst.
Here in the liquor interest, here in polluting
licentiousness, here in fraud and malfeasance, are
the great death-sores of American society ; and it
is the duty of every Christian man, in every
instance, to see to it that where he is called to
exert himself in public affairs, he so acts that his
influence shall sustain right, justice and purity.

FRUITFULNESS OF THE HUMAN MIND,

V.

FRUITFULNESS OF THE HUMAN MIND.

Oh, that men were like chimneys ! Although
chimneys collect soot all the time, they can be
cleaned. But men cannot be cleansed from the
soot which they collect in the smoke of life. They
become dirty from the handling of the world ; and
nothing suffers so much in men as do the higher,
nobler, better feelings. The worst things in men
are the least injured, just as the hardest part of a
tree suffers the least by handling. The finer
emotions of the mind are like blossoms that will
not bear being handled much, that become quickly
soiled, and that soon wilt and wither. Generos-
ities, purities, moral aspirations, the romantic
parts of a man, are the things that soonest
crumble and fall to the ground.

Three hundred and sixty-five volumes in a year
would be written if the definite reflections,

50 METAPHORS AND SIMILES,

motives and emotions that every day pass dis-
tinctly through your mind, and have relation to
your character and eternal destiny, should be
printed in a book. What enormous fruitfulness !
and how much of it seems to drop unnoticed ! It
is simply impossible for a man to take note of
such a flow of inward life. One cannot keep
pace even with that which is outward.

The very nature of the mind is such that its
product is noiseless and without exponent. No
man can overhang his own soul and inspect its
experience. Thoughts and feelings shoot out in
shafts, as it were, like pencils of light that carry
the primary colors, and yet seem to be but one
color. Who can trace, in the amazing rapidity
of its action, the mind in all its moods, complexi-
ties and combinations, or in its transitions and
changes into different keys, as it were ?

It would be easier for a man to count the drops
of a river that flows by him, deep and rapid, than
to count the thoughts and feelings and fancies
that make the river of life which proceeds from
the soul.

FBUITFULNESS OF THE HUMAN MUD. 51

If, in this fresh creation, when the pulse bounds
to thoughts and feelings, and the nerves are fired,
and life and action are inspired by them, they
cannot be recognized, how much less can we turn
back to remember them ! There is no book-
keeper that puts them down. The mind keeps no
account of them. This vast multitude, this enor-
mous army of the products of your mind, march
noiselessly, every day, in the soul.

The mind's action is like that of an engineer
who works under water. He goes down in a
diving-bell, and is hidden. The work progresses,
and the structure rises, but it does not show
above water at all. It is there, but it is deep-
seated and concealed. Thus the eternal founda-
tions of the mind's character are laid far down
and strong, the work being so out of sight that
men do not see it nor suspect it. Such being the
case, men are being destroyed by faults of which
they have no conception ; for faults, oftentimes,
are like mines with which men blow up bastions
and towers of fortifications. Afar off, they by
whom the work is done break ground, and hidden
and unseen they dig until they have carried the
mine under the foundation. The occupants of

52 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

the place know not what is going on till the last
moment, when the tower leaps into the air, as if
it were filled with life, and that which before was
a strong defence is a heap of ruins. I know men
who have a mine laid right under the curtain-wall,
which only awaits the day and hour when it shall
be fired. I know men who continually walk over
mines capacious enough to hold forty hogsheads
of rum, but who do not know that it is under them.
I know men who have mines dug under the very
port of their life by rank dishonesties. I know
men that have vices enough utterly to destroy
them. But they work under ground, and they
will not notice them, and nobody will tell them of
their clanger, and they will perish. But though
they do not know about these things, God knows
about them, and the devil knows about them.

Not one in twenty of all those mental operations
which are inwardly working to form that eternal
character which shall carry reward or punish-
ment, joy or woe, excites men's attention, or ever
comes to their remembrance. It is a terrible
thing to have this engineering going on in a man,
and he know nothing about it, and take no
account of it.

FRUITFULNESS OF THE HUMAN MIND. 53

Men are insensibly filling up the mold and
frame of their character in entire ignorance.
Their passions and thoughts and fancies are like
so many clerks. Suppose a man should neglect
his business, and give unlimited power to his
clerks, and they, in his counting-room, should go
on signing papers, filling up checks, running him
in debt, tying up his affairs, and he should know
nothing about it ? You have not less than forty
clerks ; and there is not a day in which one or
another of them does not use pen and ink that
carry judgment in God's day of reckoning.
They are writing what they please. Many of
them are confidential clerks. One is Pride ;
another is Vanity ; another is Lust of Power ;
another is Greed of Gain ; another is Self-
indulgence. If they go on unrestrained, those
clerks will break you, as sure as there is a God in
heaven. Your eternal affairs are becoming
involved, your spiritual interests are being
hazarded, and you know nothing about it.

It does not take much to make a popular man.
A kind of outside goodness ; a sort of leniency
toward other people's faults ; the knack of making
men happy by wit and mirth ; the art of stroking

54 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

men's love of self pleasantly — these qualities will
make a very good fellow. There is nothing that
makes a man "good" but the knowledge of how
to tickle other men's selfishness, and please them
with themselves.

Hundreds and hundreds of men are going
straight to perdition ; but that which is carrying
them there is hidden from their view. They have
secret thoughts enough to sink a ship, and yet
they carry them buoyantly and bravely. Nay,
men anxiously and purposely hide the truth from
themselves.

How imperceptibly persons grow out of free,
generous, sympathizing youth into narrow, close,
selfish, stingy manhood !

Here is a youth that is docile and humble, but
aspiring and full of promise ; and who would ever
suppose that by degrees and gradations so gentle
as not to leave a crease or a seam, he would grow
up to be a hard and cruel man ?

FBUITFULXESS OF THE HUMAN MIND. 55

Here is a sensitive child, whose cheek becomes
incarnadine at the thought of wickedness ; and
yet, being brought constantly into contact with
evil, he goes through such a process of thinking
and training that, step by step, he comes to a
point at which it is no more trouble for him to
thrust a dagger through a man's heart, and to
join in league with the greatest criminals, than
at first it was for him to be pure and innocent.
And, great as is the change that has been wrought
in him, he cannot point to the spot where, nor to
the time when, it occurred. Little by little, and
unconsciously, he passed from one extreme to the
other.

Crimes and vices may be of two kinds : they
may be occasional, intermitting experiences, or
they may be simple exponents of the general
character. Where vices and crimes are pimples
that indicate the habitual state of the blood, the
man is corrupted all through ; but a man may now
and then have a pimple when his blood is not
very bad.

If a man is sober and touches no intoxicating

56 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

drink during the whole year till the ill-fated first
of January, and then goes around to see his
friends who unkindly tempt him with wine, and
he gets drunk, what proportion does that single
day of intoxication bear to all the twelve months,
lacking one day, of temperance ? And, on the
other hand, if a man is drunk twelve months,
lacking one day, and is sober only on the first of
January, what proportion does that single
temperate day bear to all the wallow of the
beastly year ?

It is possible for a man to abstain from out-
ward manifestations of wickedness, and yet be
wicked through and through. There is a paltry,
narrow, unmanly kind of prudence, which keeps
a man back from lion-like wickedness. Guarded
by such prudence, a man does not do anything on
a large scale. He does not venture at all. His
sins are all mermaids. There is not a line on
them. But they are all as mean, and they in-
dicate as much wickedness, as sins that are more
overt and of greater magnitude. He never stole
or robbed, nor committed what is called a crime,
nor indulged in what goes by the name of vice ;
but there is not a throb of his soul that is not a

FBUITFULNESS OF THE HUMAN M1SI). 57

throb of selfishness. There is not a pulsation of
his life that is not a pulsation of pride. There is
not a movement of his mind that is not in the
channels of vanity. He is corrupt in every part
of his being, only his corruption is made up of
infinitesimal depravities. He is sin-rotten. There
are a great many such men. They are keyed to
selfishness. Their purposes are selfish. All their
ways are selfish. Their whole conception of
living is selfish. There are men whose entire
character has been built up with successive steps
of invisible wickedness, until, although they are
decent and law-abiding, and although they stand
well in society, when God looks upon them he
loathes them.

I have taken notice, when I have seen men
tapping a gas-main, that those who worked in the
escaping gas all the time did not smell it, whereas
those who but occasionally came near it, smelled
it very sensibly ; and I take notice that men who
are constantly in the midst of the stench of their
own corruption never mind it.

PATIENT WAITING.

VI

PATIENT WAITING.

Upon the woman comes the greatest weight of
sorrow in all afflictions. It is rare that a man
suffers as a woman does, from death in the house-
hold. Upon her comes the duty of patient wait-
ing with the sick. She it is that has hand-to-
hand conflicts with Death : at last, in the charge
by which the feeble structure is overthrown, she
is found confronting the dread enemy face to
face ; and after the struggle is over, in which
death has been victorious, she is the greatest
mourner. At the Cross last, and at the' Sepulchre
first, were the women ; and by them more tears
were shed and more sufferings felt than by all the
other disciples. That is typical of woman's lot
in the household the world over ; and women
need, perhaps more than any others, the spirit of
patient waiting.

62 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

I remember that once, on going into my father's
kitchen, in Ohio, to speak to Charles, our hostler
and gardener, I found him reading a book in
which I thought I perceived mathematical dia-
grams. On examining it, I found it to be a
scientific treatise on geography, in which all the
astronomical problems were wrought out. As I
had seen him, from night to night, with his tallow
candle, poring over this book as though it were
the last new novel in the hand of beauty (though
he was not beautiful), I asked him if he under-
stood what he read. " Certainly," said he, "most
certainly." I saw that there was some Latin in
the book, and asked him if he could read that.
Oh, yes, he could read Latin, and he talked it.
It put my college honors somewhat in peril, and I
feared he might be talking to me in Latin ! "Do
you understand Greek?" I said. "Oh, no; I
can only read it — I cannot speak it." There was
that man, deriving his small monthly wages from
my hand, and he was my master, probably, in
every walk of science and literature.

Appropriate work, which we like, covers up
sensibility, takes away temptation, withdraws the

PATIEXT WAITING. 63

mind from morbid cares and fears, and gives it
wholesome employment. It is a good thing to
work because you love to. If you do not love to
work, it is a good thing to work because you have
to.

While people are young, or strong, or pros-
perous, they think little of the great army with
muffled banners who are silently walking amid
troubles and disappointments, clay by day, unable
to do or achieve.

Men are not always, by any means, matched to
their appropriate work, nor joined to their ap-
propriate place in society. There is neither
principle, nor law, nor experience, by which we
can always sort our children and connect them
with the thing for which they are best adapted in
their outward nature. Besides all that, however
well a man may be situated, and however well
adapted his education and faculties may be to
his position, there are ruptures of society,
upheavings and sweepings of Providence, that
dislocate men.

5

64 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

A man may have power in his own language ;
but let him travel in Europe, where he passes
from the English to the French, from the French
to the Spanish, and from the Spanish to the
German, and see how that power is shut up in his
mouth. If a man feels proud at home, I would
advise him to go abroad, for a month or two, and
learn how insignificant he is. A man traveling
in a land of whose language he is ignorant is
like a man swimming in the Atlantic. He is
shorn of those ten thousand comprehensive ways
which at home made him vital, sympathetic and
useful, but being shorn of which he is left almost
as a dead man.

Society is full of persons who are below their
appropriate level. Where this occurs in youth it
is right, because young people can press their
way up ; they are like young and vigorous plants
that draw an abundant supply of food for growth
through the roots below ; but when men pass the
climax of life, and with discouraged spirit are
thrown down below their level, it is not so easy
for them to obtain nourishment. Then the root
itself in them is impaired ; and when they are

PATIEXT WAITING. 65

transplanted they can scarcely get hold of the
soil again, to grow.

Largely, women do not enter into the social
state ; but, as that state is built of glass, when
they are once in it some sidelong blow may
shiver it in a moment. Such is the uncivilized
condition of society that there are but few alter-
natives for a woman. Women who are broken off
from their relations to the domestic circle find but
few channels in which they can employ thought,
taste, fidelity, affection, and stand independent in
the community.

Are there not multitudes whose minds are
stored with valuable information, who have fine-
ness of taste that indicates much of the artist
nature, and who have been trained to nice moral
distinctions, but who ply the needle, teach in the
lowest schools, or spend their energies in the
meaner walks of life ? Are there not multitudes
who are conscious that the greatest part of their
inward nature is buried, and has no function ? Are
there not multitudes who, although there are a few
things on which they can bring the power of their

66 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

mind to bear in its higher ranges, are conscious
that they are carrying the great orb of their
being in obscuration, veiled and darkling ?

The power Hungarians had in their own
country was gone from them when they came
here, and in some respects they were buried alive
while they lived. God deliver me from being an
exile, from being a stranger in a strange land,
out of reach of my mother tongue. Send me to
prison ; give me quicker dismission by the halter ;
let the bullet do its work on me : but, of all that
could be sent me of misfortune and trouble, the
worst would be that which should place me among
strange people, speaking a strange tongue ; to
walk up and down without position, without a
function, without a home, without a country, and
without friends.

Some men are obliged to stand low, and see
other men, who are pigmies compared with them,
going onward and upward. It may be very easy,
if you are prosperous, to say that such men ought
to wait; that they ought to clothe themselves
with patience; that they ought to substitute

PATIENT WAITING. 67

large-mindedness for a narrow complaining dis-
position ; but did you ever walk where they are
called to walk ? Would you be willing to change
places with them, and see how easy their lot is to
bear ? Nevertheless, your advice is good. I too,
think men who are thrown into circumstances
where they are obliged to derive their very life,
not from outward success, not from attritions and
collisions with their fellow men, not from the
remunerations of pride, but from deeper sources —
from faith and hope, and trust in God, and the
resplendent horizon of the future life, which shall
never be marred by circumstances — should have
royalty of disposition, and wait patiently. But it
is not easy to give them this advice, nor is it easy
to blame them if they do not readily take it.

Where our enforced idleness is of a transient
nature, we look hopefully forward to being restored
again to vigor ; but where incapacity becomes our
daily attendant, our hope dies away. Moreover,
long-continued sickness ceases to excite sympathy,
because it has not alarm in it. We sympathize
with our friends in proportion as we think they
are in danger. Our sympathy for a man who has
the toothache is nil.

68 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Where men have sickness in the form of weari-
ness, and do not suffer from violent pain ; where
they are so fragile that they break down under
almost every stress, and find it impossible to plan,
or at any rate to achieve, in life ; where they are
obliged, continually, to ask leave of their brain to
think, and to ask leave of their feet to walk ;
where they are prisoners, and every member of
their body is a jailer, and they feel that this con-
dition is to continue, not for a week, nor a day,
nor a month, nor a year, but as long as they live,
and that their life is to be shortened by it ; where
they are obliged, with their body of death and all
its infirmities, to walk in obscurity, and to be for-
ever pensioners upon the doctor — under such cir-
cumstances it is not easy for them to patiently
wait. And yet here is a sphere of waiting — that
kind of moral waiting in which a man measures
his condition, and then clothes himself with a
manly grace which enables him to accept the lot
to which in the providence of God he is appointed,
and lift up his head inwardly, if not outwardly.

Many that we call shiftless are like a bag that
stands up when it is full, and collapses when it is
empty.

LAYING UP TREASURES.

VII.

LAYING UP TREASURES.

The mind can be fed only by the mind. Money
cannot buy love, sincere praise, honor, trust,
sympathy ; and yet without these a man starves
to death. An animal can live without them, but
a man, who does not live by bread alone, cannot.

If one gets riches and keeps them to the very
end of this life, there still will come the everlasting
future. There is a life compared with which this
life is but a fringe or margin ; and woe be to the
man who has no treasures laid up for that life !

It is possible for a man to be refined and good,
and yet extremely poor, in a rich city ; but it is
not possible to take cities, nations or tribes, and

72 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

keep them at the bottom in respect to property,
and yet civilize them, or develop in them any
eminent degree of culture.

It would seem as if saving property must inevit-
ably bring men down to material and physical
conditions. At first it does draw the individual
man thitherward ; but its secondary effect
through society at large is to lift men away from
the earthly and material life, giving them leisure
for high culture ; for art and learning ; for all the
rounds of intellectual life — which could not be the
case if men were always compelled to spend their
best strength in serving the body with the means
of bare existence. A man who is so near to
nothing that he is obliged every day to think of his
mouth and his skin, who lives to deal with secular
things absolutely, has very little surplus strength
left by which to develop the higher and nobler
parts of his nature. By wealth accumulated in
communities there is secured for moral education
a broader platform. By it is secured leisure,
with means and instruments by which men are
taken away from physical conditions and lifted up
toward the intellectual and spiritual.

LAYING UP TREASURES. 73

Men must have more than wealth, even for the
enjoyment of wealth. Indispensable as accumu-
lated treasures are to the civilization of communi-
ties, much as wealth empowers the individual,
and is the golden key that opens many and many
a door that is shut to poverty, yet even wealth is
powerless to bless men by the things it can give
if the possessor has nothing else. We must have
truth, honor, fidelity, or we will lack those very
elements which give wealth its chief value.

Money will do very little good to a man who is
without character; for when money shall have
addressed itself to the narrow circle of his passions,
and fed them, it still has left the whole manhood
in him unfed and untouched. The hunger of the
soul goes on.

If, a man be evil, without repute of social good-
ness ; if he be hard, miserly, unlovely, selfish,
inexorable, exacting, and ungenerous, men will
hedge him up with their dislikes till he is shut out
of society, and almost void of satisfaction.

74 METAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

There is nothing to me more piteous than the
outcry of the soul of a man who, during all his
earlier years, has accumulated until at last he has
all that money can give, but who is obliged to
confess that his riches are not enough, and who,
in the longing of his inward nature, says, uO
man, love me ! O man, praise me ! my soul
hungers and thirsts. I fain would be happy, but
money cannot make me so. Let me have honor
and sympathy. What are the ways by which men
have earned the favor of their fellow-men ? Let
me earn it."

Even if one gains wealth it is subject to fluctua-
tions, particularly in our age of the world, and in
this land, where no man has any guarantee that
he will long possess it. My life has not run
through a very great number of years ; and yet I
have lived to see two or three generations of rich
men plowed under.

It is a terrible thing, after years of luxurious
living in this world, to be suddenly turned out
into poverty. And if this is a misfortune, how
much more is that a misfortune by which a man

LAYING UP TREASURES. 75

is turned out of this world, and all his wealth
and prosperity here, and sent a bankrupt into the
other life !

He that is developing his reason, his affections
and his moral sentiments, according to the laws
of God, is laying up treasure for heaven; and it
is by these things that we are to live in heaven.
But are these the only treasures that are laid up
in heaven ? I think not. I believe many are
laying up treasures of faith and of prayer in
heaven. I believe those ten thousand yearnings,
aspirations, nameless feelings, which lift us up
morning or evening above the ordinary routine of
life, and teach us that we are different from the
mere animal, are registered in heaven. I believe
there is a literature of the heart which is undying.

We are laying up treasures by all the good that
we do upon others — upon our children and our
fellow-men who have been objects of our care,
solicitude, and labors of love. A word of yours,
fitly spoken, may have saved a soul ; and God will
forever pay you interest on that capital. Your
fidelity may have brought scores out of ignorance,

76 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

and you will not fail to reap your reward. Of all
the treasures that we lay up in heaven, methinks
none will strike us with more surprise than the
treasures of consciences purified, hearts lifted up
and souls redeemed, by our instrumentality.

I have vindicated the wisdom of commerce and
of industry. I justify you, mechanic, merchant,
rover of the sea. If men say you are squandering
your life because you are laying up earthly
treasures, I stand between you and your accusers,
and say it is wise to make money. It is not wise
to hoard it, but it is wise to lay it up. That man
who lives in his early years for his middle age is
a wise man ; and that man who lives in his early
years and middle age for his whole life is a wise
man. You have a right to lay up treasures in
this world ; but oh, what fools they are who know
enough to do that, and do not know enough to do
the rest ! It is there that I condemn you, and
take all excuses from you.

There are a great many poor men who are very
rich, and a great many rich men who are very
poor.

LAYISG UP TREASURES. 77

You are all workers, or you are vagabonds.

The less chance a man has for success, the
more credit is due him if he succeeds. Any man
can run down hill ; but he that can clamber up to
the top of a steep precipice where birds can
scarcely go, and where few men dream of going,
and cast down opposition, and intrench himself
there, deserves the highest praise.

Men talk much about "menial" callings. What
is a menial calling ? It is a calling that makes a
man mean. The moment any calling makes a man
a man, he has dignified it and glorified it. Show
me the chrysalis first, and what a prejudice I
have against butterflies ! but show me the
butterfly first, and after I have seen that, how
beautiful the skin looks out of which it was
hatched ! I carry the beauty of the thing itself
back to that from which it came, and by associa-
tion dignify it. And I honor a man that has
built himself up in vocations where no one
suspected such a thing ; that has dug up treasures
where none but such an ingenious and industrious
man could have done it. But oh, by as much as

78 METAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

you have been wise, sagacious and rich in these
things, I dishonor you, I deride you, I inveigh
against you, if you have stopped with them, and
have no wisdom at all for your manhood — if you
have everything for your boyhood, your earthhood,
and nothing for heaven — everything for time, and
nothing for eternity !

Many men are a great deal richer than their
money makes them. They are rich in bills, in
silver, in gold, but they are a thousand times
richer in the currency of their thoughts and feel-
ings. I know men who are richer in heart and
soul than you would suspect. There are men
whom, though men gird them about with preju-
dices, and batter them with their tongues, God
sees as seams of gold, of diamonds, of rubies, of
precious stones, and of whose riches the world has
no idea.

There are many men who are a great deal poorer
than they seem to be. I will not mention their
names, but I think of men in the city of New York
of whom I have sometimes said to my chance com-
panion, as we walked along the streets, uFor

LAYING UP TREASURES. 79

what would you be such a man ? If you had to
take his nature, would money buy you ? " I have
seen men such that if the earth were one solid
mass of gold, and there were another world rigged
for me to enjoy it in, it would not hire me to be
like them. They are rich on the outside, rich in
their clothes, rich in their pockets, rich in all but
aspiration and spiritual relish and manhood, rich
in everything but that which is immortal ; and yet
they are poor, poor, poor !

REMOTE AND PERMANENT RESULTS.

VIII.

REMOTE AND PERMANENT RESULTS.

I do not know that there is one thing, outside
of love to God, that it is more important that
young men and women should understand than
that there is a law of equity which runs through
every department of human life, and that you
cannot get more than you pay for.

That which you can grow in a day is lettuce ;
and how long will it last ? That which it takes a
hundred years to grow is the oak ; and it lasts
forever. Time is the best tan-bark in the world.
It seasons things, and makes them tough as
leather.

How do you talk to your son, who is about to
start out in life? Do you say to him, "My boy,
live for what vou can find to-dav1' ? Do you not

84 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

say to him, "My son, foresight is the very life of
business" ? Do you not point to this or that man
and say, i i He does not see further than the end of
his nose" ? Do you not warn him against follow-
ing the example of men who run upon quick
adventures and get sudden harvests ? Do you not
say to him, { i My son, you must lay foundations.
It is not possible for you in a day to organize a
great business, and understand affairs in all their
parts, and have the confidence of men so that you
can command social and commercial resources.
Therefore you must not be in a hurry" ?

Men who have left works that have stamped
them with a just reputation of possessing genius
have been, since the world began, the most indus-
trious, the most multifarious and the most con-
tinuous workers, no matter where you look for
them.

Those results in moral conduct, in intellectual
enterprise and in social elements, which interpose
the least time and the fewest processes between
cause and effect, are the most evanescent and the
poorest. In other words, the things that it takes

REMOTE AXD PERMAXEXT RESULTS. 85

the shortest time to do are apt to have the least
in them ; whereas, those results which spring
from complex causes, from long-acting and inter-
acting influences, and which require a great deal
of time in their development, are generally the
most rich and enduring.

" Patient continuance in well-doing" is the
very law of success ; and all results that are really
sudden are to be suspected as transient and
unsubstantial.

God has established human life on a law of
reciprocity. As you cannot buy from a fellow-man
commodities without a price equivalent to their
value, so you cannot obtain from nature nor from
society benefits out of proportion to the price
which you pay for them.

Whatever you want in thought you must render
an equivalent for in industry. Whatever you want
of praise, of power, of wealth, since it cannot be
stolen, must be earned by fair equivalents. If any
man seems to get it without having paid an

So METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

equivalent, the results will show at last that it was
illusive, and that no man ever did have and keep
that which was worth having and keeping except
it had been earned by square equivalents.

There is an impression that men can take short
ways to prosperity — that they can safely make
haste to be rich ; but if men felt universally that
it was as absurd to take short and dubious ways
to obtain success and influence in wealth, in
learning, in art, in literature, as it would be to
take such ways in husbandry, it would raise the
tone of morality fifty per cent in a single year.

It is very important that the impression should
be produced that there is a moral law in secular
affairs just as really as there was a moral law on
Mount Sinai, and that this law asserts itself per-
petually, unheralded, unsuspected, unproclaimed.
Although there is no thunder or lightning about
it, no table of stone on which it is written, and no
prophet to declare it, after all there is the same
moral law running through business, social inter-
course, every department of life, and it is silently
asserting itself by its rewards and penalties.

REMOTE AND PERMANENT RESULTS. 87

There is an impression that God gives sonie men
the right to go through without paying toll. No,
there are no " deadheads " in nature. Nobody rides
there without paying. There are no men who
run the gate, under any pretense, in nature. What,
not men of genius ? No, not men of genius.
What, not men of rare endowments ? No, not
men of rare endowments. Great men are great
workers ; and men who pretend to know without
working are impostors, I do not care who they
are.

The great ends which men are seeking are
wealth, praise, honor and love. Their price is
high. Gained without paying that price in exer-
tion which implies time, they are surreptitiously
gained, and will surely be held briefly. If you
want to be wise, do not be in a hurry. If you
want to be true, do not make haste unduly. Take
time to let that which you want grow.

Understand that whatever knowledge you have
you must quarry out. "Work out your own
salvation " may be applied to intellectual matters
as well as to matters moral and spiritual.

88 METAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

If results are to be truly great they must con-
form to nature, and be seasoned by time.

A man says to his son who is starting out in
business, " Do not live for immediate things, but
learn to live by faith in remote results. Begin by
preparing to augment your proportions. Earn
your prosperity by thinking, by proving your
fidelity, and by showing yourself to be sagacious
and industrious. Lay down your lines, and then
work up to them. Thus by and by you will come
where you will be not only prospered, but sub-
stantially prospered." Calling his attention to
one and another, he says "They are mushroom
men who come up in the night and last but a
day?"

I hear men saying, in respect to purely religious
or philosophical things, u Oh, these thread-draw-
ings in philosophy, these imaginary states, may be
very well ; but we practical men have to attend to
practical things ! " There is an implication that
practical things are the substratum on which a
man must stand before he can begin to take care
of invisible results, such as report themselves in

REMOTE AXD PERMANENT RESULTS. 89

character, power and what not ; but these men,
while they sa}~ this in respect to religions things,
are most strenuous advocates of invisible things
when speaking of their worldly affairs, in which
they are better educated, and in which they are
therefore better judges.

Any man who talks about a royal road to learn-
ing is an empiric, a charlatan. An}' man who
says he will teach you French in five lessons is a
fool, or thinks you are a fool. What estimate
must that man put upon you who offers to teach
you to write in three days ? Who does not know
that all such hot-bed forcing processes of educa-
tion are fruitless and unsatisfactory ?

"No man can gain knowledge but by giving an
equivalent for it.'' You cannot inherit another
man's experience. You cannot bribe books. Still
less can you bribe Nature, the unwritten book of
all knowledge. And if a man will have an educa-
tion which consists in the training of the faculties,
and which is the only real education, he must
render an equivalent for it of thought, of pain, of
watching, of various and long-continued industry.

90 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Sudden learning is superficial gilding ; and learn-
ing that is deep-seated comes with long-breathed,
long-paced industry.

What is genius ? You may describe men as
divided into two classes, one of whom have brains
and an organization such that they have the
power of automatic action, and the other of whom
have the power of being inspired into action.
That is, some men are organized so low in grade
that they think or feel that there must be causes,
social or material, acting on them from without.
We call them common folks. There are others
who are organized higher than these. They have
sensibility of fiber such that their brain, unmoved
by external reasons, by its own tendency seems to
develop thought and feeling. Where a man is
inspired in the direction of music, we call him a
musical genius. The word genius merely indi-
cates a more than ordinarily fine organization in
any single faculty. If this fineness of organi-
zation extends through the whole brain, then the
whole brain is brought under the law of genius.
A man who has genius, simply has a little better
instrument than one who has not.

ACTIVITY INDISPENSABLE TO NORMAL
DEVELOPMENT.

IX.

ACTIVITIY INDISPENSABLE TO NORMAL
DEVELOPMENT.

The young man, beginning in life, says to him-
self: "I am obliged to rise early, and sit up
late, and labor incessantly ; but I hope for a
better time." Ah, yes, that better time is the
fool's paradise of laziness !

Activity is as indispensable to health as motion
to the purity of water, or to the cleansing of the
air.

The exercise of brain and bone and sinew is
your blessing. The economy in which you live,
that obliges you to task these, to make them
versatile and continuous in their action, to apply
them everywhere, to hew with them as though
they were an axe, to pierce with them as though

94 METAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

they were a spear, to contest with them as
though they were a sword — this is God's gift to
you. The man who has to work, and does work,
is the blessed fellow ; and he that is not obliged
to work, and does not work, is the accursed
fellow. Yet men accept this condition of fresh-
ness, of vigor, of health, of happiness, and of self-
respect, as if it were a sign and token of bondage
— a disgraceful harness !

Since the days of Benjamin Franklin it has been
easier for a man to be a compositor than it was
before ; he left almost a professional element in
that mechanical business ; and out of type-setting
have sprung more great public men than from any
other manual employment. Since the days of
Roger Sherman it has been easier to be a shoe-
maker. Shoemakers are almost always meta-
physicians. It would seem as though it had come
to be a prescriptive right for them to be thought-
ful men. There have been sturdy men at the
anvil, who have made blacksmithing an occupa-
tion that no man need be ashamed of. It is a
good thing for a man to have humanity stamped
on the thing which he is called to do ; and the
more noble he is, the easier he makes it for every-

ACTIVITY. 95

body else in after life to pursue it. It is noble for
a man to throw the elements of his manhood into
his business in such a way as to redeem it from
coarseness and lowness, and exalt it with new
associations.

I assert of every laboring man in this nation,
not only that he is to be a laborer, but that he
has the means of securing, and ought to secure,
such development that there should be refinement
in his social affections ; and I hope before I die
to see pass away the thought that there is a pre-
sumption against a man's being refined because
he is a laborer. There is nothing in labor incon-
sistent with refinement, with kindness, with affec-
tion, with whatever belongs to the domestic
circle ; and there is no reason why a man that
lays brick should not be a perfect gentleman.
There is no reason why a man that hews timber
should not exercise all those sweet and gentle
traits which have a dignifying and refining influ-
ence. Trees which bear blossoms are far more
beautiful than those which do not.

It is a fundamental law, pervading the whole

7

96 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

economy of the race, that man shall be active,
that he shall work. It is the law of health ; and
health is the fountain of the lower forms of happi-
ness. It is the condition, also, to a very large
extent, of the higher forms of happiness.

Our happiness is organic, and depends upon
conditions of activity— -not a mere aimless moving,
but coherent, organized, intelligent activity — not
such activity as leads the intolerable fly in the
days of summer to buzz with amazing appearance
of doing, and yet doing nothing, nor that kind of
incessant pottering which springs from no motive
and accomplishes nothing ; but that activity which
is an application of lawful means to proper ends.
Beginning at the lower ranges of happiness, a
man will be happy in the proportion in which he
achieves, or hopes to achieve.

We are creators, within a certain range. In
one sense we are gods in creation. Although
we originate nothing, although that by which we
wx>rk and upon which we work is prepared for us
by the greater creative force, yet in our lower
sphere and in our small measure we make our new

ACTIVITY. 97

combinations, and create, even as God in the
greater sphere creates.

The seeking to accomplish, the compassing of
the ends sought, and victory at every step — these
furnish the whole measure of what may be called
secular happiness. The same is true of the affec-
tions. It is their activity in accomplishing
results, guarding them and guiding them, that
constitutes their happiness. Their motion is
their rest.

A right end of life that develops and moderately
taxes every part of the whole organization, an
aim which keeps alive and whets and renders
active every part of the human economy, will
reap as much of the lower measures of happiness
as it is possible for a man to attain in this
world

Houses that are given over to impure air and
mould and dust, will fall to pieces faster than
houses that are used. And so it is with the
human mind. There is no way in which it can

98 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

be deteriorated faster, or brought into morbid
conditions sooner, than by indolence.

One soil, if it be exceedingly sandy, will pro-
duce but twenty fold. Another soil, of clay, will
produce fifty fold. * Another soil, of deep vegetable
loam, will produce a hundred fold. And so men
are rich, richer, and richest in their endowments,
and the same amount of exercise will produce
different degrees of product in different men.
But, notwithstanding, the universal law of use-
fulness is that men are to be useful in proportion
as they are active.

It is thought that if a man has genius he comes
to knowledge without study. Many suppose that
if a man is smart, if he is a man of taste, if he has
to do with commerce, with politics, with scho-
lastic pursuits, if he is a public man of any sort,
he can do things abundantly and easily without
labor. But the reverse is true. In proportion as
a man is useful he is constantly industrious. The
products of a man's mind and of his nature are
useful according to the ceaselessness of the activ-
ity that is imparted to the one or to the other.

ACTIVITY. 99

There is no man born so great that he can
afford to be indolent. Every man, though his
head be as massive as Webster's, needs to study
and ponder. Even if a man be endowed like
Michael Angelo, it is needful for him to be, as
Michael Angelo was, one of the most laborious
men of his age. Though, like Titian, he has all
artistic taste, and lives to the age of a hundred
years, it is not simply his genius but the power
with which he applies himself, and his continu-
ous industry, that mark and register his use-
fulness.

Every one should make up his mind, in the
beginning, that whatever faculties God has given
him, the condition of his holding them is their
ceaseless activity.

A man might as well repine because he is not a
Frenchman or an Italian, and is an Anglo-Saxon,
as to mourn over his lot in life.

The necessity of laboring has been your salva-
tion. It has been that which has made you what

100 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

you have been, an^l what you are still. It has
been a token of God's mercy to you. And instead
of bemoaning your condition, thank God for it.

You have got to be what you are ; as a man has
been educated, so must he pursue life ; and to
murmur at his occupation, to look wistfully at
something else, to spend his time in thinking
what he would like to do, to cover some other
pursuit with his imagination, and make fancied
flowers grow upon it, and see abundant and
varied fruit hanging from its boughs, while mak-
ing his own business as barren and hateful as
possible, and rising in the morning to say, "Must
I go to work again ? " and going home at night to
curse the day's work — this is unmanly and mean.

I love to see some sturdy smith, or laborious
mason, or delver in the soil, who, although he
perceives that there are occupations that would
have given him a larger sphere and more agree-
able results, yet honors and dignifies his vocation,
and makes every man that comes after him a
better man, because he has left with his pursuit a
name that does it credit.

ACTIVITY. 101

Of the thousand million men on the globe, so
few are able to develop any considerable activity,
except in the lower part of their being, that it
seems a hopeless task to elevate them. We
scarcely can think of the great mass of the earth's
population as pursuing any such line of duty as
we prescribe for ourselves ; but in this more
happy land, where intelligence has developed
manhood, and where opportunity is greater than
in any other part of the world, there is no excuse
for a man's acting from low motives.

I have often, in going to my little place in the
country, rode past great tulip trees ; and I have
noticed that those sturd}^ trees bear just such
blossoms, and blossoms as full of beauty and
fragrance, as the tiny tulip plant does. So may
it be one day with sturdy labor ! May robust
laborers ere long be covered over on their sides
and tops, as those great stalwart trees are, with
blossoms of beauty and refinement !

THE LAW OF FEELING.

THE LAW OF FEELING.

As streams of water turn mill- wheels, night and
day, themselves slender, yet powerful in their
accumulation, so trickling heart-streams turn the
grand wheel of life's purposes.

We have had in our day a magnificent opportu-
nity to see what is the grandeur of the feeling of
patriotism in its primary state. It flamed out in
our midst so that it was indeed like a pillar of
fire by night and of cloud by day, that showed the
people which way to go through the wilderness :
but it is gone, and neither you nor I can arouse
it again.

When, in June, one first strikes a prairie that
is on fire with flowers, he knows not whether he
is in the body or out of the body ; the coarsest

106 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

and hardest natures are powerfully impressed by
the scene, and sensitive natures are almost trans-
lated ; but the experience is transient.

At first the feeling of patriotism was like a
bonfire or beacon light, for giving alarm of
danger, or for guiding ; but now it is a diffused
light, spreading itself throughout the hearts of
millions of men, and manifesting itself in practical
deeds. It was good at first, but now it is better.
Then it was intense and concentrated ; now it is
gentle and diffused.

I have walked for hours in the red and yellow
sea of the Louvre, feeling a kind of sacred intoxi-
cation such as to render me almost unconscious of
my bodily state; but being too much to last, it
soon passed away.

The primary condition of activity is that in
which a feeling is first developed in the presence
of a motive or excitement, and exists simply as a
feeling, answering the call of its proper motive,
and giving experience of its peculiar kind of

THE LAW OF FEELING. 107

pleasure or pain. It is this state which exists
when there passes before the eye some visible
object of beauty, loveliness, or attractiveness.
Under such circumstances the soul rises up and
glows with pleasure and joy, the mind being filled
with feeling and only feeling.

The sentiments and emotions are active and
vivid. They excite the substance of the brain
and the nervous system, and where they are
carried to great height they excite the whole
being, sometimes modifying the organs of the
body, and almost superseding the entire muscular
and physical system.

In its primary form, a feeling, where it is an
intense, vivid, conscious emotion, subsides quick-
ly. It is a blaze, not a coal.

Dana relates of himself that when, after having
been absent from home about three years, before
the mast, on a perilous voyage, the vessel was
nearing his native land, he fed deliciously on
the prospect of soon seeing those he loved ; but

108 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

that when she came into port, and a boat was
sent to take him to the shore, he could hardly
prevail upon himself to go off and meet his
friends. He had passed the acme of feeling, and
was under the influence of that reaction, with its
accompanying numbness, which comes after an
excess of emotion or excitement.

The body cannot bear high tension of feeling of
any kind very long. It uses up the organizing
matter too fast.

The mind can be played upon by motives as a
harp can be played upon by the fingers of the
harper ; and as in one case the nature of the tone
produced is according to the nature of the string
that is touched, so in the other case the nature of
the experience or feeling produced is according
to the nature of the faculty that is excited, and
the degree to which it is excited.

In some old cathedrals of Europe, where there
are finely built organs, they are accustomed, at
twilight, to play out the day by some solemn

THE LAW OF FEELING. 109

anthems ; and people gather and stand scattered
through the great dusky structure, and listen. As
the inspired man touches the instrument and
swells to the high accord of his theme, all hearts
are moved. A thousand memories are awakened
in each breast. The feelings of many are soothed
and laid to rest. All are filled with emotions of
joy. At last the theme closes, the music dies out,
silence reigns, and one by one the people steal
away. The music is gone, the organ is silent;
and so is the experience. The church is not more
empty of sound when the organ stops than are
their hearts of the feelings which the music in-
spired. The proud man is proud yet ; the avar-
icious man is avaricious yet ; the worldly man is
worldly yet. What has taken place ? They have
had a repast. They went to the cathedral, and
the organ played on them as the organist played
on it. The transient and momentary experience
came and passed away almost in the same moment.
Though the feelings were genuine, it is the nature
of all feelings in their primary state to rise and
fall, if not in the same moment, yet within the
space of a few moments. Now, it is evident that
if these were the only feelings experienced by
men our life would be flame-jets, which would do
nothing but puff, and puff themselves out.

110 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

There is a way in which feeling comes down
from the high state in which it primarily exists
into a condition where it will not exhaust itself;
where it will not speedily pass away ; where it
will do something more than make itself feel good.

Nothing darts more quickly through a mother's
heart than the fire of love, when first she sees her
long absent child, or when she hears sudden out-
cries of alarm at its danger.

No paper article, no advance of armies, no
vote of Congress, no orator's appeal, no preacher's
fervor, can again cause to burst forth the feeling of
patriotism with the strength and in the particular
form by which it was characterized during our
civil war. But something better has taken place.
In its stead we have patriotism in its secondary
state, in which it is diffusing itself, laboring, and
producing results.

Let one listen to or read the productions of a
skillful writer or lecturer like Ruskin, and how
wonderfully his mind is filled with feeling in its

THE LAW OF FEELING. Ill

primary state ! but when you leave the lecture-
room, or prairie or picture gallery, having had a
meal of joy, the feeling will have produced little
effect upon your daily life. It must now subside,
and reappear in your dress, in furniture for your
house, in the embellishments of the yard, in the
laying out of the garden, in the improvement of
the public streets and roads, in efforts to beautify
your surroundings in ten thousand ways that
indicate a cultivated taste.

A primary emotion will have an influence on
the life as long as the exciting cause is present,
and no longer ; but a feeling in the secondary
form is diffused through life, and works in it per-
petually. It is less pleasurable in the secondary
state than in the primary state, but it is ten
thousand times more efficacious and useful. The
law of feeling, then, is that it has two states, in
the first of which it is a mere feeling, and in the
second of which it harnesses itself to a practical
purpose and becomes an efficient laborer in daily
life.

The law of the faculties runs straight through

8

112 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

the whole congeries of feelings. Religion comes
first, as a high, transient feeling, instead of a
continuous working feeling of a lower grade.

The good man takes his primary feeling into
the second form, in which it works in him, day
by day, till he has organized his life upon it. The
bad man, after having experienced feelings in
their primary state, merely feels that he has been
played upon. When he goes out of the church he
is like a violin whose bow is hung up.

I am afraid more than" half of those who think
themselves to be good go to church because they
are played upon, first by the organ, then by the
minister, and both in the same way, one playing
on them by music, and the other by eloquence or
disquisition.

Men enjoy the feelings that are aroused in them
while they are under the influences that produce

THE LAW OF FEELING. 113

them, but- when they go away from the attrac-
tions of the church to the greater attractions
that await them at home, these things are for-
gotten. With the odors of the dinner go the odors
of the sanctuary.

THE ADMINISTRATION OF WEALTH.

XI.

THE ADMINISTRATION OF WEALTH.

Where a man has before him only the thought
of becoming worth -more, and then more, how
poor is his idea of manliness ! How great a
power he has in his hands that he does not under-
stand ! What would you think of swine that were
rooting and grunting with diamonds in their
noses! Was there ever anything worse thrown
away than such diamonds ? What do you think
of men who have power to revolutionize the gen-
eration in which they live, to underlie society and
lift it up, to report themselves in every part of
the globe, and to transmit their influence for
thousands of years to come, but who have no more
idea of it than swine have of jewels in their noses !

The wealth-developing power of our common
people surpasses that of any other people on the
globe. See how already our gigantic billion debt

118 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

is melting down like snow in April ! That which
other nations honestly thought would crush us has
scarcely ruffled a feather.

Wealth may be used for the purpose of breeding
wealth. Men make money with apparently no
other idea than that of its accumulation. I can
understand how a man might have great pleasure
in campaigning for wealth, in laying out a plan,
in selecting instruments, in supervising them, and
in doing it against competition. Enterprise,
activity, thought, and victory are themselves
intrinsic pleasures to an active-minded man, and
are not unworthy of him. But all this is aside
from that peculiar disposition which we see in
some men who begin generously and liberally
with wealth, but who, when they come to a point
at which it seems to them that they may reach
vast estates, change from naturally kind-hearted
men to mere mongers of property, and think
merely of how to roll over and over the ever-
accumulating ball.

Even if you are a Christian, and you have but
just presented yourself among the brethren to take

THE ADMINISTRATION OF WEALTH. 119

on the vows of Christ's household, and your lips
are still wet with the sacrificial wine, and the
bread of faith is still in your mouth, you need not
be ashamed to say, "I am bound to serve my
Lord and Master through money."

The lowest use of wealth is that of the miser,
who simply hoards it. I do not dissuade you
from miserism, because men never fall into it
except by disease. It is monomania.

Where a man brings from far and near those
pleasures which report themselves in the senses,
employing his wealth merely as a means of
luxury, he makes himself still more an animal
than nature made him. I need not pause to hold
up such persons to appropriate condemnation.

One may really have a conscience toward God
and man, in the administration of wealth, at the
same time that there is a superficial vanity which
goes with it ; and he ought not to be condemned
as simply vain because there is a streak of vanity
in his good qualities.

120 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Some men become rich beyond any personal use
they can make of their wealth. But I am as rich
as they are. I have as much as I can use wisely
and comfortably, and they have no more than
that. All the surplusage which is in their pos-
session they are simply agents of. It is to them
very much what to me is the gold which I own in
the mountains of California. I own it, but never
see it nor handle it; and the same is the case
with them. I do not appropriate my wealth ;
neither do they theirs.

I apprehend that when a man is worth a million
dollars he has a shadowy sense of knowing what
he is worth ; but, beyond that, figures fade out and
he simply has a vague sense of being considered
high up in figures.

I believe that poverty can be put to good uses,
and that a man can be true and noble in poverty ;
but I do not consider that poverty is a condition
of holiness. I believe the world has got to learn
how to be holy with wealth and influence and
power, and that we shall never see the noblest

THE ADMINISTBATIOX OF WEALTH. 121

specimens of manhood till men are brought up,
not in weakness and poverty, but in a royalty
that shall be more than a match for wealth, and
subdue it to holy uses. One of the first steps
toward this is to make more of the household,
which is the fundamental, initial element of civil-
ization and prosperity.

I believe in grounds, and in the decoration of
them. I love to see a man make a paradise
about his house and fill his trees with singing
birds. Taste should preside over the home.

Mark out, if you choose, in the future, a ground
that at last shall be a picture that you yourself
have made, not in colors, but in trees and shrubs
and other adornments that nature shall produce
under your guiding hand. Plan a mansion with
all conveniences and beauty and hospitableness.
Imagine yourself and those about you in this
temple of loveliness and refinement. And with
these ideals before you strive after them. I
would not have you seek wealth clandestinely,
with a feeling that somehow or other it is wrong.

122 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

It is right to seek it, and it is right to use it. It
should be used, but it should be used with
generosity and liberality for the sake of doing
good.

DANGERS OF FAMILIARITY WITH ETIL,

XII.

DANGERS OF FAMILIARITY WITH EVIL.

Oftentimes great and open temptations are the
most harmless, because they come with banners
flying and bands playing and all the munitions
of war in full view, so that we know we are in the
midst of enemies that mean us damage, and we
get ready to meet and resist them. Our peculiar
dangers are those which surprise us and work
treachery in our fort.

There are a great many who have not wisely, it
seems to me, considered what is the duty of a
Christian in regard to pure conversation. Not a
few are in the habit of interlarding their conver-
sation as they never would their lives. I have
seen persons that I knew to be truly moral, as
far as their conduct was concerned, who did not
hesitate to make their mouth a passage for
indecent stories.

126 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

I have known men that were apparently good
husbands and parents, from whose lips, if I were
with them for an hour, was sure to come, like a
spark from the forge of passion, a story that
carried in it some hint, some innuendo, and made
things that we ought to look at with horror
matters of mirth.

In respect to a pure thought, a noble idea, the
memory is often treacherous ; but an impression
made by obscenity seems to be ineradicable. I
call you to bear witness to this fact. Are there
not impressions on your mind that were made by
bad men in your childhood which you would give
all the world to have rubbed out ?

I really think that God meant to teach the
world the way to purity and nobility through
woman, in spite of the seeming evidence that I
have occasionally had to the contrary. I have
never, for an hour or a moment, ceased to feel
toward woman, in her ideal character, almost as
the devotee feels toward the Virgin Mary ; and
the individual exceptions never take anything

FAMILIARITY WITH EVIL. 127

from the brightness of the divine glory there is in
the conception of mother, wife, and sister.

I believe, with old Martin Luther, that the
noblest thing God ever made on earth is the heart
of a noble, loving woman. It is this feeling that
makes it impossible for me to make any exhorta-
tion to woman, who, whether school-girl, servant,
or mistress, instead of being taught by us in
matters of this kind, should be our teacher, and
cleanse our tongue, purify our imagination, make
us better, and not teach us how to be beautiful in
evil.

I attribute the social corruption of our times
largely to the prevalence of secret, or scarcely
secret, books, novels, so-called reformatory works,
physiologies of the Devil, written on purpose to
demoralize the community. All that a prurient
curiosity wants to know, and that a* manly con-
science scorns to know, is proffered, in one form
or another, to the young, and at a trifling expense
is sent through the mails, with every means and
appliance of damnation.

9

128 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

We read that in the olden times the Devil took
on sometimes the form of a serpent and some-
times the form of an angel of light. I often think
that in our day he takes on the form of a book.

A book is an omnipresent influence that has no
disposition, and yet has all the power of a dis-
position. It is one of the most powerful of influ-
ences for good or for evil. The engine of the
world is a book.

What shall I say of art ? If familiarity with
impure suggestions and ideas in literature is bad,
how is it when the senses are called, indirectly,
by every form and line and color of beauty, to
assist in the contamination ?

One of the most exquisite works of art, and one
of the most abominable violations of decency, is
Powers' Grfeek Slave. There are three classes
into which pictures of the nude may be divided.
I do not deny that there is a limited sphere in art
for nude figures ; but it is extremely limited, and
they are to be permitted only in the case of those

FAMILIARITY WITH EVIL. 129

masters of art who may be called hardly less than
prophets, and who can create a nude figure so as
to have the moral sentiment predominate in the
impression which it makes upon the mind. Such
masters are few. Indeed, he may almost be said
to be a miracle of genius that can do this. I
may say, in general, I think that in all art repre-
sentations, where nudity is employed, the moral
reason for employing it should be so strong as
quite to overcome a sense of the fact itself— and
that limitation almost rules it out entirely.

While, then, I would admit that there is a
limited sphere in which nudity may be employed
for high moral purposes, the plea of those who
stand in the second class, that it is done for the
sake of art, is one of the most unsound and
dangerous pleas that can be offered. I cannot
conceive of any possible reason why a slave should
be stripped and made to wear a chain in the
market-place. It is neither true to fact nor to
nature. On the other hand, take that exquisite
work of art, Ary Schaffer's Francesca da Rimini,
in which the artist represents Francesca and her
lover as hurling through the lurid air of perdition,
and holding each other with a firm grasp, while
her face bears the mingled expression of love and
amazement and grief, and on his is depicted the

130 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

expression of unutterable despair. In the latter
case the mere accident of partial nudity is quite
forgotten, or almost unthought of; for the solemn
lesson that the scene conveys almost precludes
the possibility of indulgence in improper reflec-
tions on the part of the beholder. There was a
reason for nudity in this case ; but in the case of
the Greek Slave there not only was no reason for
it, but it was employed against fact as well as
against decency.

There are many sorts of nature — beastly nature,
animal nature, human nature, angelic nature, and
divine nature ; and the same kind of nature is
susceptible of being represented in different states
and conditions ; but it is not necessary that all
the phases of nature should be exposed under all
circumstances. There is to be discrimination in
regard to the aspects of nature which shall be
made permanent lessons of instruction. It is
abominable, the way in which decency is violated
in works of art !

In the portfolio of many a Christian household,
even, the pit of perdition may be found. There

FAMILIARITY WITH EVIL. 131

are books on almost every center-table in which
are cuts that have the tendency to take the blush
and bloom off from virginal purity. And ought
there not, in regard to books of art and portfolios,
to be an aspersion of sacred cleansing — a sprink-
ling of the divine spirit of God ?

If our children were angels we should not need
to have any concern about them on this score ;
but they are not. They are passional creatures ;
the fire of appetite is strong and fierce in them ;
and because they are impure, it is all the more
necessary that influences calculated to promote
purity should be brought to bear upon them.
There should be no provocation to lust, appetite,
or anything of the sort placed before them. God's
angels might walk in the midst of impurity with-
out hurt, but our children cannot.

It is not always the bad that go to drinking
"shades," gambling dens, and other similar places
of resort with which the city is filled ! Many
that go there are persons who want to "see
life." They are the tender, the callow. They
are }~oung men who are ashamed of seeming

132 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

to be ignorant of vice, and are ambitious of being
supposed to know a great deal more than any
decent man ever ought to know. They cannot
endure tobacco, and yet they smoke for fear they
shall be thought not to be men. They have no
natural taste for liquor, but they swig and guzzle
because they want to be men, and because they
think that is the way to make men of themselves.

It is objected that it is not always possible to
get away from evil. Remember, then, that when
you do not submit to evil, when you set your
mind against it, and when you put yourself in an
attitude to correct it, it will do you no harm,
though you are in the midst of it. If you refuse the
laugh, if you decline to indorse the tale, if you
abstain from joining in the conviviality, if you are
found faithful though you are among the faithless,
then, so far from being harmed you will be
benefited; so far from being brought down by
evil, you will be lifted out of the sphere of its
influence. You will be a reformer, under such
circumstances, and God will take care of you.

THE LAW OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT.

XIII.

THE LAW OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT.

Whether your child shall be an idiot or not is
a matter of some importance ; but to teach those
fundamental laws which shall enable the com-
munity to steer clear of imbecility and brain-
rottenness is considered scarcely the thing for
the school or the household, and especially for
Sunday, for the pulpit, or for a minister.

As science, developing itself, is the eye of
God throwing light on the path of man and
showing us what are his thoughts that have
slumbered so long ; as the sentences and pictures
on the pyramids were unread and uninterpreted
till the torch revealed them ; so God's sentences,
written in the heaven and on the earth, and un-
read, science is deciphering.

136 MMTAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

A tendency to good or to evil is transmitted,
and it becomes a fixed quality if it be educated.
But this note, so far as the human race is con-
cerned, is almost never sounded ; and it is an
accident when men heed it. Society is full of
results that flow from the violation of this great
natural law. Am I not called to see it every
day ? Am I not made dumb over the coffin every
month ?

Can I, in those cases where ill health has
wedded ill health, and where in the children
there is produced a double tendency to ill health
— can I, when, by reason of low stamina and the
violation of the great law which governs heredi-
tary tendencies, I am called to weep with those
that weep (for love mourns over those that must
die as well as over those that might have been
saved) — can I, at such times, say, "The child
could not but die. You have violated a law of
nature, and you are suffering the penalty. The
next child will die, and the next. Death will
reign in this house " ?

In cases where there is a lack of brain, and the

THE LAW OF HUJIAX DEVELOPMENT. 137

fact is deplored, can I speak of the cause of that
evil? And yet, here is this law of the trans-
mission of tendencies which has its application
all through the animal kingdom, and which
applies, if possible, with ten thousand times more
force to the human race than to the lower animal,
and it is neither taught by priest nor by teacher ;
nor is it observed by the common people, that
run headlong by taste, by fancy, by caprice, by
interest, and by parental interference, to form
connections on which are to turn not only their
own happiness but that of their posterity to many
generations.

I stand with awe when I hear it declared that
God will visit the iniquities of the fathers upon
the children from generation to generation, and
that he will send down from generation to gen-
eration the virtues and obediences of the parents.
That is the keynote of time : it ought also to be
the fundamental quality of civilization.

I believe I could go to the Five Points and
preach the Gospel with hope and assurance that
some would be converted ; but if any were con-

138 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

verted, the first sign I should look for would be
that they would wash and shave. I should
expect the first thing they would want would
be another window, that they might get a
draught of air into their attics. I do not believe
I should be able to make of them good Christians
that would not backslide if they continued in
filth and without air.

As the world's atmosphere grows purer and
purer, the radiance of God's heart will more and
more stream into the hearts of the masses of men.
Thus, with improved conditions from top to
bottom, the day is coming when it will not be
strange to believe that there will be nations,
millions of men, that will all stand higher and
better than any single man that has yet lived.

When the day comes — and it waxes nearer and
nearer — that men are born into this world with
auspicious temperaments, with balanced constitu-
tions, with high social qualities, and with moral
tendencies which give them power to develop the
dormant and imbecile forces in themselves, they

THE LAW OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. 139

will have taken a start, and will be much further
along than thej are now.

Men will never be converted when they are
at discord with all the physical laws of their
being. A man here and there, with more than
average susceptibility, may be raised out of
degradation where the conditions are unfavorable ;
but if you are going to raise the mass of men out
of heathenism, you must do it by securing, at the
same time that you preach to them the Gospel of
Christ, their obedience to physical laws.

Liebig, the great German chemist, says you
can measure the civilization of nations by the
relative amount of soap they use.

I hail the incoming of science. Although for
the present it has some tendencies toward skep-
ticism, although it is to a considerable extent in
the hands of men who are rebounding from
religion, I have no fear. I believe that, with the
aid of the revelations of science, we shall come to

140 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

have a deeper and truer faith in religion than we
have ever had.

If I had not faith in God and in religion, I
might be afraid of science, but I believe God and
religion are true — so true that all the incursions
of science will finally, when it has run through its
full circuit, be beneficial.

De Tocqueville said governments would be as
rascally as they were allowed to be ; and I believe
it is as true on this side of the ocean as on the
other. To say that governments have hindered
more than they have helped, is not to say the
whole. One of the burdens of society, one of the
curses of the human race, has been governments.
Men dread anarchy, as if that was the worst
thing ; but that is heaven compared with govern-
ments such as have generally prevailed.

There is a time to come when governments will
spring from the hearts of the people, and will be
governments for the people. In that day all laws,
all civil usages, all customs, will respect the in-

THE LAW OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. HI

terests of the community, and will not obstruct
them. When men have perfect liberty, individu-
ally and collectively; when they are not only
equal but free, — free in the largest sense of the
term freedom, — then society itself will become a
nursing mother.

We have seen Christian piety manifesting itself
in single faculties ; we have seen it nourished, as
it were, under glass and by artificial heat ; we
have seen it as a grand partialism ; but the day
is coming when men, through a full knowledge of
the natural law of transmission, will be brought
into this world larger-minded, healthier in body,
better adapted to go up in the scale of being, and
under such conditions that they will encounter far
less obstruction, and receive far more of the un-
conscious help of justice, purity and truth.

Now our great names are few and far between,
like angels' visits ; but the day will come when
they shall be near and numerous ; when no
man shall say to his brother, "Know ye the
Lord," because all shall know him; when " holi-
ness" shall be written on the very bells of the

142 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

horses, and there shall be the tinkling of praise in
every man's ear ; when the atmosphere itself
shall inspire holiness ; when all things shall tend
toward holiness ; when kings shall be nursing
fathers, and queens shall be nursing mothers ;
when all people shall be lovers and friends. In
that day, lifted out of the animal conditions, and
out of the obstructions of ignorance and wicked-
ness in which we now dwell, the whole world
shall send up a final shout, not only of deliver-
ance, but of consummated manhood.

It will not take place to-day nor to-morrow, but
a steady, average development and growth there
is to be, which will carry up the manhood of this
world far beyond anything of which we can now
conceive.

SORROW AND ITS DANGERS.

10

XIV.

SORROW AND ITS DANGERS.

There are many fruits that never turn sweet
until the frost has lain upon them ; there are
many nuts that never fall from the bough of the
tree of life till the frost has opened and ripened
them : and there are many elements of life that
never grow sweet and beautiful till sorrow touches
them. Then they are like autumnal colors, and
all men behold and admire them.

Sorrow should be like loam which, when the
plow turns it, falls mellow from the share.
Sorrows that are like clay which, when the plow
turns it, rolls over in lumps, and is more unman-
ageable after it is plowed than before, bring poor
husbandry in the heart.

Blessed is the man whom no trouble can alto-
gether destroy ; who, if he finds an enemy in

146 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

one chamber, retreats to another, and bolts and
bars the doors ; and who, if he is driven out of
that, finds another resource, and another, and
rises higher and higher till he reaches the thresh-
old of his Father's house, where no more sorrow
nor crying can come forever.

A woman of great gifts and high culture, at
about twenty-one years of age, was affianced to a
man distinguished in literature and science, and
she looked forward to a life of joy ; but the ocean
claimed him. The sorrow that fell upon her fell
like multitudinous frosts in autumnal days ; and
no green and bright thing was left in all the field
of her heart. With mighty stragglings through
weeks and months she sought to stop her sorrow ;
and finally she turned from it, saying : u I will
give my whole life hereafter to others, and let my
own self go." She consecrated herself to the
work of education.

A mere wild, ungoverned and ungovernable
impulse of pain, directed to no good purpose
whatsoever, submerging the mind and smothering
the mental powers, is always bad. There may be

SOBBOW AXD ITS DANGERS, U7

moments when sorrow is uncontrollable, and when
one is relieved by giving way to it ; there are
bursts of sorrow which are but the experiences
of the hour or the da}', and it is better to let them
spend themselves, and not narrowly mark their
bounds and passages ; but all sorrow, beyond the
first relief of agonized feelings, should be held in
check.

Sorrow is a school in which the schoolmaster is
very stern, and in which his rules are very strict.

At no time is a person under such obligations
and such a duty of self-control as when he is
under the shadow of trouble.

There are those who think it is wrong to let
their sorrows die out. If they find that their
pain is becoming alleviated, they blow the
embers again, and rake out the coals from the
ashes that threaten to hide it. They are almost
alarmed at themselves when now and then some
old joy breaks out. They seem to feel that there
is a sacred duty of sorrow, and that midnight

148 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

ought to be their symbol and signal. They study
sorrow. They bring back old experiences, and
tempest their minds as much as they can. So
they continually wear the badge of sorrow.

There is a sorrow that sweetens all acerbities,
that breaks down hard and reluctant natures, and
that corrects the natural disposition. Many a
man, who would not yield to his fellow-men, at
last yields to his own suffering and sorrow and
is all the better for it.

It is wise for us to invest our joys in many
directions, that we may never become bankrupt.
When men invest their means, they scatter them
here and there ; so that, if bankruptcy should
touch one sort of investment, others would be left.
This is wise in money matters, and it is a great
deal wiser in morals. When a man has all his
means of enjoyment in one place, if trouble comes,
and his only resource is swept away, he is
bankrupt indeed.

THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME.

XV.

THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME.

There is great wealth in time. There are
honor, pleasure and benefits innumerable in time
well spent. It is like a soil full of richness, if
one has the skill and patience to bring forth what
is in it. It is like a mountain full of precious
metals, if one has the enterprise to discover them
and dig them out. It carries the things that men
need and desire. It is like the great Oriental
caravans that came across from India to Tadmor
and Babylon. Upon camels and dromedaries
were heaped gold and silver, spices, silks, fine
linens, ivory, gems and jewels, and precious
perfumes. All things that could be wished, and
that men coveted and delighted in, were there.
So all of a man's fortune is laid up for him in time.

A large part of every man's time must needs be
consumed, in one sense, for the sake of giving

152 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

potency to the residue. It is remarkable how
the principle of the use and waste of one thing for
another pervades creation. One third of our
time is thrown into the sea of sleep. It dies, that
the other two thirds may live to be of worth.
For every two hours living, and full of strength,
there has been one sacrificial hour that laid itself
down for them.

It is very striking to consider how little time
we have for wise usage. And yet, everything
that a man hopes for, or expects, or needs, must
come from the right use of that little. Though
we are crowded into a corner, eternal things
depend upon our action during that brief and
circumscribed space.

You can conceive how one might, by early
exposure to infectious diseases, lay the founda-
tion, in every organ, of weakness and after suffer-
ing through this whole life ; and yet, no exposure
of that kind can be compared with such ex-
posures to vicious and criminal indulgences as
shall prepare mischief and misery for all one's
life.

THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 153

Many employ their time in fostering passions
and malign desires, which are to turn their life
into a volcanic region scorched and burned.

There is to be a use of time which shall secure
the respect and confidence of all that are good.
There is to be an honored and honorable old age ;
and time is well spent which shall procure that.
There are your own peace of mind and self-
respect after the battle of life is over ; and that
time is well spent which secures them. There is
to be happiness in the world to come ; and time is
most wisely spent by which it is secured. Time
is the purchase-money of all things.

There are men who go from one day into
another without having anything to bind those
periods of time together. If you should rub out
the yesterday of many men, their to-day would
not feel it ; nor does there seem to be anything in
their to-day which will make a particular impres-
sion on their to-morrow. Their days are saunter-
ing days. They come into them scarcely knowing
what they shall do with them, and go out of them
scarcely knowing what they have done with them.

154 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Nor are their neighbors able to inform them.
There strikes through their days no far-reaching
idea. They are not architects who are laying
line upon line of brick, and course upon course of
stone, and carrying up from a well-ordered found-
ation the whole superstructure.

Blessed are those bankruptcies which, over-
throwing the fathers, build up the children.

How many painted men and women there are !
How many houses there are in which the boys
and girls, for aught that they are and do, are of
no more importance than the portraits which
hang around the rooms ! In how many house-
holds will you find shadowy children ! They are
good enough, and kind enough, but there is noth-
ing of them. They have no grit, no will, no
executive power. They are mere pale outline
portraits of what would have been men if there
had been anything to make them such. For it
is not birth, but life, that makes men. It is
what you give yourself, and not what you have
from father and mother, that develops manhood
in vou. In the aimlessness and listlessness of a

THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 155

life that is surrounded by such abundance that
there is no pressure of motive, how many there
are that merely stand in life without growth or
fruit ! While they are present they are not felt,
and when they go they are not missed.

Of women there are a great many who are
cultured, fertile of thought, and full of yearning
aspirations, but who are restrained by the habits
of society and their social condition. It is sup-
posed that women must wait until somebody opens
the door for them, and that then they are per-
mitted to go out and fulfill the functions of life.

There are many who diligently occupy them-
selves without aim. A thousand little doings
disconnected from each other are no more a wise
building up of life than the laying of a thousand
bricks in a thousand different places would be the
building up of a house.

Some persons affect to despise newspapers
because they lie so. They do not lie any more
than men do. Men are natural born liars.

156 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Speaking the truth is pre-eminently a heavenly
grace, and one that is deferred, mostly, till men
get to heaven ! There is a great deal of lying in
the newspapers ; but no more, I take it, than in
any other channel through which an equal amount
of human life passes.

There are many whose only thought in reading
is to enjoy the momentary pleasure of reading ;
but there are many others whose thought in read-
ing is to get into the current in which God, the
race and the nation are traveling.

An energetic use of the scraps of a man's time
is often potent enough to make the difference
between knowledge and ignorance. I see many
a young man who throws away enough time to
gain an education in. An open book, full of
interesting matter, braces the mind and gives it
tone and intellectual appetite. If in the morning
a man would read a single paragraph while dress-
ing or shaving, it would afford him some compen-
sation for the tedious toilet which he makes.

THE USES OF FEELING.

XVI.

THE USES OF FEELING.

The heart has nothing to do with belief in
astronomy, chemistry, geology, or mineralogy ;
but where it is a question of right and wrong the
heart has everything to do with it. You would
not, in the settlement of a nice question of benevol-
ence, appeal to an old hunks who never had any
feeling except that of selfishness in all his life.

There is a great deal of moral drunkenness pro-
duced by stimulating preaching which does not
inspire a man to think anything or do anything,
but which burns and burns, and makes him
happier and happier, but not better. A man that
is happier and not better is worse.

What is a fiction ? A truth clothed with imagin-
ary circumstances.

11

160 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

A man who is courageous is much of the time
very quiet. Does he feel courage while he is
walking down the street ? Probably not once a
week. He is full of it, but it does not mount up
into any state of feeling. What is it doing ? It
is bedded in him. It is incorporated in every
part of his being. The moment the need of it
comes it is organized and pulsating ; but until
that time it is diffused throughout the man as a
latent power which, like powder, only needs to be
touched, to flame out with tremendous force.

A man who does not use his conscience often,
has terrible paroxysms of it ; but a man who
uses it all the time, never comes into what is
called a state of conscience. It comes on him as
dew on flowers, and falls on him gently as rain on
the ground. He is full of conscience, but it is
not concentrated at any single point. It is dis-
tributed through the brain, the nerves, the
muscles, and the skin. It is in every part of
him. It pervades his life. It does not, there-
fore, rise up into a freshet.

How long do two lovers carry the very ecstacy

THE USES OF FEELING. 161

of love ? Well, it may exist, with great economy,
for a short time, as a mere emotion. And here I
desire to give some important instruction, in
which lies the happiness of men and women in
the marriage relation. If you give yourselves up
to the influence of the feeling of love merely, you
will have a real intoxication for a short time, and
that will be the end of it. You must understand
that feeling, to last long, must develop itself in
the line of conduct. While you may not disdain
the hilarity of disclosive feeling, you must under-
stand that it cannot be long-lived unless it enters
into the judgment and fancy, and fills the moral
being, the whole life, and works for the object
loved in a thousand ways. Then it is immortal.
It is the very blood of your life. You cannot
weed nor rub it out.

Truths of being, moral truths, truths of love
and conscience and fidelity and purity, truths of
art and literature, and above all truths of religion,
are to be known only through the intellect mag-
netized by the feelings.

We know the truth if we have the right feelings

162 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

behind the judgment. This is directly contrary
to the popular philosophical impression ; for men
speak of being blinded by their feelings. They are
blinded by them ; but they are enlightened by
them, too.

I affirm in respect to the far larger and trans-
cendency more important sphere of truths, not
only that the feelings are not in the way of form-
ing a right judgment, but that you cannot form
any valid judgment without them. They are the
very fountain of truth out of which come true
judgments.

We often inveigh against the passions and
appetites ; but they are God's fundamental forces
in this world. You might as well take the spring
out of a watch as to take the appetites out of a
man. All society would collapse and be worthless
without them. Regulation, not annihilation, is
what the passions and appetites want.

The law of feeling is strictly a law of use.
Feeling without anything to do, so far from being

THE USES OF FEELING. 163

a thing to be sought, is a thing to be avoided.
It is like more food than the body can digest, or
more stimulus than the nerves need. It is intoxi-
cation. It is self-indulgence.

Fear, existing as a pure feeling, is not only a
torment, but a poison. There is nothing that
goads the fiber so. There is nothing that so
deteriorates physical quality and health itself.

There is one function of feeling which ought not
to be forgotten. I mean that of refreshment. It
has a certain office like that of sleep, which is to
wipe away, as it were, the effect of work. It
may be said in some sense to recreate the mind.
Hence our word recreation. It rests men. Here
is the foundation of what we call amusements.

Where feeling exists in an unembodied form it
tends to flood the mind with a kind of self-
indulgence or emotive selfishness. Here is the
key to the mischiefs which come from theatric
representation and fiction, neither of which is in
itself sinful, and neither of which needs to be

164 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

injurious, but which are sinful and injurious
simply because men do not understand the law of
feeling.

As spirituous liquors produce their effects by
causing feeling which has no outlet in thought or
conduct, so mere moral spirits do the same.

God has emotion, doubtless ; but all the waves
of the sea, all the pulsations of the air, all the
throbs of the sunlight, all the circuits of natural
law, all the endless processions and bounties of
the seasons, are but so many veins in wilich the
love of God is injected and is working itself out.
All the processes of matter in time are so many
symbols, signs and expressions of emotions that
exist, not as emotions, but as forces that are
producing certain results. And so it ought to be
in us. A feeling should not exist in us as a
feeling merely, but should work ; and we should
give it so much to do that it cannot remain a
mere feeling.

WORK.

XVII.

WORK.

jSo men are more to be pitied than they who,
with their time on their hands, have no employ-
ment. Their state is one which it is difficult to
describe. The French call it ennui; and never
was there a more vexations and intolerable little
devil than this same ennui ! As soon as a man is
inactive in body and mind, he begins to have a
thousand nameless ills and aches, and a thousand
sleepless nights and tormented days.

In riding, it is sometimes the case that you go
just slow enough to carry the dust with you, and
so move in your own dirt. It is exactly so on the
great road of life. Men go just fast enough to
keep their cares and troubles and dust along
with them ; while, if they would drive a little
faster, their dust would roll far behind them, and
they would keep themselves clean. It is good to

168 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

be active enough to leave behind you the tempta
tions by which you are surrounded.

Work is said to have been the primal curse in
consequence of our father Adam's fall. I beg
your pardon, it was not. Drudgery was ; but
what is drudgery but slavery ? After the fall of
man slavery began as a brute punishment ; not
honest work, in which man was the projector,
the doer, and the recipient of his own earnings.

A manual craft that implies no thought or
ingenuity stands very low. A man who simply
shovels, exercising neither skill nor intelligence,
who does mere muscle- work, is at the' bottom of
the scale. A man that thinks to shovel goes
higher in proportion to the thought which he adds
to the physical exertion. The man that hews is
higher than the man that chops. The man that
fashions with his chisel is higher than the man
that hews. Workers differ according to the
difference in the amount and quality of the mind-
power which they put into their work. All kinds
of labor grade themselves along the line of what

WORK 169

is called respectability — according as they are
understood to require a higher or lower develop-
ment of mind.

There is no man who cannot bring great-
mindedness to any calling in which he is em-
barked. It does not need that a man should be
born a United States Senator ; for he that is on
the shoemaker's bench may make himself one of
the greatest of statesmen. Nor does it need that
a man should be born a geologist ; for he that
works in a stone quarry may make himself one of
the most eminent of philosophers. Where a man
begins to work is where he begins ; but it does
not follow that that is where he ends. The point
of criticism is, that a man should suppose his
trade to be the measure of what he is to be ; that
he should look upon himself as shut up in it ; that
he should admit that he must be no bigger than
that trade.

The manhood that God gave you the capacity
of exercising is the measure of your life ; and
when you fill the vocation that you are in. and

170 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

have a great deal to spare, you will be called
to go up higher. If you are engaged in that
which is drudgery, you will soon grow out of
it, if you have the spirit of emancipation in
you. If you are just fit for a drudge, if you
only have a thought for the present, if you think
your present attainments are enough, then be
content and do not grumble ; but if you are fit
for something more, then make something more
of yourself and do not grumble. Why do you
grumble, if you are fit for nothing more ? And
if you are fit for something more, why do you
grumble ? A man is fit for something higher
when he shows himself to be so by doing some-
thing higher.

■•♦•■

Do not repine and say, "I am not content
with this ; I am not satisfied with its remuner-
ations ; I am fit for something better. There is
a man that was born to wealth, who is no better
than I am. There is a man who has gone up
in life, and I have as much right to go up as
he had." Talking in that way will do no good.
If you have as much right to go up as that man
had, why do you not go up ?

WORK 171

Many seem to study to render their cup as
bitter as they know hoAv. Few there are that
whistle and sing as they work. Most people
are moody about their labor. They look upon
it as a task imposed upon them by necessity.
They would rather do something else. So men
augment the disagreeable elements of their
calling.

Work is the law of life, of honor, and of
decency ; and if God has called you to any field
of labor, work lovingly, rejoicingly, happily, in
that field, until you have so filled it with your
swelling sides that that which binds you shall
give way, as does the outer covering of a grow-
ing tree. Work is like bark ; and you will drop
it as fast as you expand.

There is a mistaken feeling among men gen-
erally, that the sooner they make their fortune,
and get away from the necessity of rising early
and sitting up late, the better. It is a false
principle that needs to be cleansed out of the

172

METAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

mind. It ought to be understood that man is
born to work, that he is to live by work, and
that he is a man by virtue of work. We ought
to feel that he is highest in the scale of man-
hood who knows how most wisely and contin-
uously to fill up the measure of every hour by
work.

UNCONSCIOUS SELFISHNESS

XVIII.

UNCONSCIOUS SELFISHNESS.

The whole body is the tongue of a man, and it
is all the time unconsciously talking of what the
man is. It is not merely the face that talks : it
is the whole man.

Many a man who has a blunt, harsh, per-
emptory, disagreeable way of meeting people,
excuses himself by saying, "Oh, it is my way."
Of course it is his way ; and it is the trip-
hammer's way, when a child's hand is on the
anvil, to smash it ! An elephant's way is no
more agreeable because it is an elephant's.
Neither is a swine's way, nor a vulture's way, any
more agreeable because it is his way. It is no
excuse, when a man carries himself so as to be
offensive and painful to those around about him,
for him to say, "It is my way."

12

176 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

If the father is A and the mother is B, the child
is not necessarily AB ; and yet parents think it
must be so. There is a whole generation behind
father and mother ; and they are nothing, often,
but a lens that catches the scattered rays of light,
and brings them to a focus.

The household is God's harp on earth, and
each child is one more string to give wondrous
harmony to that of which father and mother are
but the monotone or theme. But, alas ! we do not
know the power of the string, the mode of touch-
ing it, nor the scale of sweet sounds which it is
capable of producing.

It is a fact that a man who has no skin over
his nerves, has no skin over his nerves, and that
he suffers ; and you that wear rhinoceros hides
are not to despise him because he cannot bear as
much as you can.

If a man's nerves are like whipcords, what
contempt he has for a nervous and hysterical
person ! And yet I take it that persons who are

UNCONSCIOUS SELFISHNESS. 177

hysterical and nervous are so not because they
like it, but because they cannot help it.

Many a word drops a seed from us that grows
up a thorn-bush in the soul on which it falls.

It is always fair to fight death in every shape,
and somnolency, its brother, also.

There is only a slight difference between tick-
ling and scratching ; but there is a difference.
You may take a peach and draw the plush across
the back of a sensitive hand, and the feeling is
exquisite ; but you may do the same thing with a
nettle, and the feeling is not so exquisite. There
are a thousand little provocations, some of which
are poisonous, and some of which are not. There
is one way, and only one, of making them bene-
ficial, if you haye behind them common sense ; and
that is, to see to it that there goes along with
them a sincere intent of kindness.

The root of all wisdom is love.

178 MET AP HOBS AND SIMILES.

Although there is on the froth of what is called
politeness a great deal that is foolish, yet polite-
ness, in its true signification, is only another
name for Christianity socially applied.

There is provocation in some men's faces.
There is a challenge in the attitudes of some men.

In one man it is the reasoning power that is
strongest. He may be very much exempt from
the weakness (as he considers it) of affection ; he
may be very little given to gusty, precipitous
feelings ; he may not be courageous nor firm ; but
he is a great reasoner. Another man is not much
of a reasoner, but he has prodigious perceptive
power of mind. No fact escapes him, and no fact
noticed by him is ever forgotten. He remembers
all that he ever saw or heard. Another man
possesses neither the one nor the other of these
gifts, but he has a certain sort of quiet persist-
ence. Having begun a thing, he is like the
instrument employed in boring for an artesian
well, that, driven by steam, goes through dirt and
clay and rock, forever working, working, work-
ing, till it taps a stratum of water, and opens an

UNCONSCIOUS SELFISHNESS. 179

ever-flowing fountain. Xo stroke of genius ever
moves him a quarter of an inch ; but in the end it
can be seen that he has gained.

If you look at men you shall find that they are
accustomed to erect their strong part upon a
throne of justice, and to employ it as a measure
by which to judge of other people's excellence,
and by which to administer praise or blame.

See how the business man, whose hold, when he
has once put his hand to a thing, is like an iron
clamp, and screwed up at that, talks about a
man that is loose-handed.

He who is firm can not endure men that are
always whiffling. Those who are secular and
accumulative do not like a man that is like an
empty bag.

If a man is full of imagination, he says, "I
like men who are not dull and stupid." That is,
he likes those who have imagination, like himself.

180 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Another man likes substantial men who believe
in realities. He does not like kite-flying men,
who run after moonbeams, as he calls them.

The tendency of some men to reflect themselves,
to a great degree, in the judgments which they
form of others, is one of the most potent principles
of life.

Father and mother are perpetually asking,
u Where did that trait in this child come from ? "
If a child has a strong tendency away from
business, in a family where the parents are both
practical, they set to work to weed it out. God
has given them a little poet that is being fledged
to fly and sing and take the air for its realm ; but
the father means that he shall be a banker ; and
father and mother say, l c What is this unprofitable
tendency in our child?" The mother is firm, the
father is stubborn as a mule, and they blindly
use their strongest faculties, or their habits, which
are like faculties, to oppress and tryannize over
the child.

If you employ to instruct your children a slip-

UNCONSCIOUS SELFISHNESS. 181

shod and shiftless girl, who never saw any
relation of cause and effect except between a
ribbon and admiration, whose work is overdone
or not done at all, or, as the familiar expression
is, all of ivhose fingers are thumbs, how is she
rebuked by your order, and despised and hunted
down !

The pain inflicted by the tongue is far greater,
' I think, than the pleasure imparted by it.

I may mention the unconscious selfishness which
there is in teasing, in repartee, in sarcasm, in the
whole brilliant but dangerous realm of what is
called wit. These things are perfectly allowable
within certain limitations. Badgering, rocket-
firing, everything that has the effect of exciting-
people and waking them up, if it is essentially
kind, is right and proper.

He is a benefactor who employs wit and fancy
so as to keep men alive about him ; but he is a
wise man who knows how to use these little provo-
cations so as to produce pleasure and not pain.

182 METAPHOBS AND SIMILES.

When a man carries himself among men with
such sensitive pride that all who meet him are
obliged to say, "Now let me think of every word,
and watch every thought," they are not on fair
terms with him.

It is a great misfortune to have a disposition
that carries cold and dampness wherever you go.

Some walk among men like monarchs among
their subjects, exacting tribute on every side.
It is sad to have such persons in this world ; it is
sad to have many people in it that are in it ; it is
sad to be in it ourselves. We are all mixed up.
You are walking one way, and I am walking
another. You do your mischief in one direc-
tion, and I do mine in another. Who shall cast
the first stone ?

The most comprehensive way of producing
pleasure for men's good to edification, is to have
your own life surcharged with divine benevolence.

PERSONAL INFLUENCE.

XIX.

PERSONAL INFLUENCE.

As flowers blossom, become fragrant, and are
followed by fruit, not so much by the direct
exercise of power as by the solicitation of in-
visible warmth and sweet influences, so there
shall come a time when that which we now at-
tempt to compass by coercive laws and penalties
shall be educed and secured in a higher measure,
in larger spheres, more thoroughly and better,
by simple influence.

A letter is nothing but rags with lampblack
spread over it, if you resolve it into its original
elements ; and yet the letter that bursts from the
soul as an incarnation of its love and burning
desire, going through the channels of the mail,
and reaching afar off the soldier boy in his camp,

186 METAPEOBS AND SIMILES.

is more cheering to him in his sickness, and more
curative to Him in his wounds, than all the care of
the nurse, or all the medicine of the physician.
A mother's word of memory and home thoughts
almost creates life within the ribs of death. A
letter is received from home. And what is it ?
A bit of paper with ink-scrawls. Is that all ?
Did not the mother say, " This is I ! Go for
me, and speak my soul to that dear child, which
I have given to my country and my God " ?

She did ; and the message went ; and was not
that her personal influence ? Did she not un-
clothe the soul that it might touch, as it were
mechanically, the other soul ?

A sad nature sheds forth twilight. A merry
and mirthful nature brings daylight. A sus-
picious, bitter nature insensibly imparts its chill
to every generous soul within its reach. A bold
and frank nature overcomes meanness in men.
Firmness makes them firm. Fineness makes them
fine. Taste directs, stimulates and develops
taste.

PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 187

Nature is God's tongue. He speaks by summer
and by winter. He can manifest himself by the
wind, by the storm, by the calm. Whatever is

7 c 7 i/

sublime and potent, whatever is sweet and gentle,
whatever is fear-inspiring, whatever is soothing,
whatever is beautiful to the eye or repugnant to
the taste, God may employ. The heavens above,
and the procession of the seasons as they month
by month walk among the stars, are various
manifestations of God.

God is perpetually pouring his soul through
time and space, though but few know it. Not
one man in a thousand ever understands a great
nature in his own age. We see this on the
human plane ; and how much more should we
expect to see it in the divine sphere !

Personal influence as developed in man is in
its lowest form, on account of the smallness of
our nature and its undeveloped and unregulated
condition ; but what an amazing power it must
have when it is the bein^; of God that exerts it !

188 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

So small is man that it is not safe to let him burn
on, and he stops to die that he may live again.
Every twenty-four hours there are deaths and
resurrections, as it were, by sleep, resting and
cleansing the old life, to bring in the new life of
the next day. Easily exhausted are we, running
through our periods with much friction and great
difficulty, so that we must have a night with
every day for recuperation ; but there is no
night to Him that never slumbers nor sleeps — the
Watchman of eternal ages ; he is the same yester-
day, to-day and forever; and what must be the
being across whose orb are no lines of latitude or
longitude, in whose soul are none of those par-
titions that belong to weakness, to whom dura-
tion and strength are infinite, who is as young
now as when ten thousand years ago chaos was
spread before him, and who myriads of ages to
come will be without a wrinkle or touch of
time upon the beauty of his soul ! When
such a nature, with its infinite resources and
wondrous power, pours itself abroad, what must
be its personal influence ! When you, mother,
can do so much ; when you, lover, can do so much ;
when the speaker can so influence you by his
words and his presence ; how much more can He
do who made the ages of men, and who lent us

PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 189

all that we have and call our own, and misses it
not from his infinite fullness ! What a power
there is in heaven, what a power there is on the
earth, and what auspices and auguries there are
of victory in days to come !

The most potent influence that ever can rest
upon the mind is that of another mind acting upon
it. This is the highest influence of which we know
anything at present. There is nothing, for ex-
ample, that has power on your thought like a
thinker thinking on you, as it were, or thinking
to you. Nothing so arouses the affection as a
great heart near yours. Like a fire, it sends out
its warmth to all that are near it, whether they
want it or not.

Socrates had a certain influence ; he stirred
Athens as a spoon stirs the contents of a goblet ;
but Socrates would have lived almost none at all
if he had not had his subsequent life through the
Platonic writings.

When with outstretched arms of love you call

190 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

your child to you, what do you do but ask your
body, as an instrument, to interpret to the soul,
in the language of human beings, that which is an
invisible power in the soul itself ?

POWER IN MAN TO OVERCOME EYIL.

13

XX

POWER IN MAX TO OVERCOME EVIL.

A great many men are so strong in their basilar
nature as not to answer the great ends of life. They
are too strong at the bottom and too weak at the
top to be of much use. Other men are too strong
at the top and too weak at the bottom, and are
useless for that reason. While they are strong in
the moral nature they have no impelling force.
They have neither courage nor power. Though
they carry a good head, it is an inefficient head.

God has given you great forces, not to be held
for promiscuous, unregulated uses, but to be
directed in right channels. In the stalls of the
human soul, in all the lower range of faculties,
there is not one steed for which there is not
harness or bridle, and which, being bitted and
trained, a man cannot ride and drive.

194

METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

We are not to attempt to suppress the faculties
with which God has endowed us. Do you suppose
that when he created the fabric of your being he
put into it one thread too many? that he gave
you one faculty which you do not need ? Think
you that when he implanted pride in your nature
he meant it should be rooted out ? You might as
well take the backbone out of a man as to deprive
him of this faculty. What is a man without a
backbone ? And what is a man without this
central element of self-respect ?

You must go through the world with just such
faculties as God has given you. Every man, look-
ing at himself, should say, "With this hull, with
these spars, with these sails, with this compass,
I must make the voyage of life." Are you finely
built ? Are you an object of beauty ? And do
you sit like a duck on the water ? Then it will
be comparatively easy for you to make the
voyage alone. Or, are you blunt at the bow?
Are you clumsy ? And is your rigging unwieldy ?
Then do not cut your bow. You cannot change
its form. You need not attempt to alter your
spars and rigging. You must take that bow,

POWER IN MAN TO OVERCOME EVIL. 195

those spars and that rigging, and make the
voyage with them as they are. God shoves you
out and says, " There, go to the other side ; " and
you must pass through the same storms and the
same currents that those of better build are
obliged to pass through. Some are built like noble
steamers, some like fine sailing vess^s, and some
like scows ; and each is to cross the ocean with
what God has given him. Many are lying on the
beach, whining, a Oh, if I were built so ! " That
has nothing to do with it. You are built just as
you are, your form is just what it is, and you can-
not change it. If a man's power is basilar it is
worse than useless for him to lament that it is not
intellectual. We are not to attempt to make our-
selves over, but we are to take what God has
given us, and travel homeward with it.

A hot, irritable nature may not be converted
into an even and calm one, but a man who has a
great deal of nerve, who is like a flame of fire, who
is constitutionally quick and imperious, can teach
his faculties to work in such a way as to make
his quickness and imperiousness a benefit, and
not a curse.

196 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

The liability of men to have moods will never
change, any more than the liability of the ocean
to have tides will change. If a man is so made
that his blood courses in his veins like tides in
the Bay of Pundy, how can it be otherwise than
that when the tides go out he shall be on the
sand?

As a crooked piece of timber can be made
straight, though its nature cannot be changed, so
a man's faults can be corrected, though his
natural disposition cannot be rooted out.

Men may overcome passions and appetites ; but
not simply by letting the sun shine upon them,
any more than great swamps can be improved by
letting the sun shine upon them.

The engineer, by striking channels through the
low, level morass, where nothing thrives but
noisome reptiles and insects, can drain it and
make it capable of yielding luxuriant growths
useful to men. And a man may subsoil and drain
himself.

PLANS IN LIFE.

XXI.

PLANS IN LIFE.

Of all the sad things in this world, I think the
saddest is the leaf that tells what love meant to
be, and the turning of the leaf that tells what love
has been. All blossoms — all ashes ; all smiles
and gladness — all tears and sadness. Nothing is
so beautiful as the temple that love builds, and
nothing is so miserable as the service of that
temple.

There comes a time when the maiden departs
from her father's house. She is called, she
answers, she departs. Ah ! how many visions of
angels have there been ! but they were not God's
angels. How many have gone out walking on
flowers a little way, to find that the flowers
changed to thorns ! How many have gone out
from their father's house borne on the seraphic

200

METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

experience of love, scarcely touching the ground
for joyfulness, to find little by little that love
flowed away like a summer's brook, and left in its
place but the bare channel and the gravel ! How
many have gone out to build a fiction which
perished faster than the image fashioned in snow,
which melts in the handling: !

Love is not a possession, but a growth. The
heart is a lamp with just oil enough to burn for
an hour, and if there be no oil to put in again
its light will go out. God's grace is the oil that
fills the lamp of love.

A godless woman entering into the marriage
relation goes as a lamb to the slaughter. Wreaths
of flowers are about her neck, but the knife is not
far off!

MOTIVES FOR ACTION.

XXII

MOTIVES FOR ACTION.

Hunger, cold, all the evils of the inclement
season, are so many lashes that are always driv-
ing men and saying to them, " Work, or suffer ! "

The habit of acting from the highest consider-
ations is that which makes a man noble. The
recognition of nobility may be conferred upon
men, but not nobility itself. The king lays a
sword on a man's shoulder and calls him a knight ;
but he was a knight before he was knighted, or
he would not have received the title. It was the
heroic endurance, the death-defying courage, the
skill and coolness with which he achieved his
notable deeds, that made him a knight. He was
in himself royal and noble, and the king, seeing
it, said to all men, "I see it," when he laid his
sword on his shoulder.

204:

METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

Nobles' sons are oftentimes monkeys, they
themselves being clods.

Florence Nightingale, all her life habituated to
act from divine pity, and never dreaming of
future honor or fame, discerned what other women
in England failed to see — a beneficence based on
self-sacrifice, and practiced in obedience to the
will of the Master ; and she became famous be-
cause God gave her the opportunity to do on a
large scale what she had been doing on a small
scale all her life.

There are many children (and men are but
children overgrown) that work because they are
praised for working. Their reputation and posi-
tion in life have been gained ; their standing
among men is more than equal to that of those
whose praise they covet ; their industries are
known ; they are praised ; and praise turns the
wheel of their will.

a

If one does a kind thing, saying to himself,
This will come back to me," he will get what

MOTIVES FOE ACTION. 205

he sows ; but if one does a kind thing from the
highest feelings of benevolence, there is not one
of the motives, from the top of the scale clear
down to the bottom, that will not offer up to him
in time its appropriate remuneration.

It makes all the difference in the world
whether you begin at the bottom and act from
the lowest motives up, or whether you begin at
the top and act from the highest motives down.

There are many who act from insignificant
and even ignominious motives, and attempt to
gloss over those motives with the varnish of
higher ones.

If a man acts from the lowest motives, he is in
commerce with the lowest things, and gets what
they produce.

That motive which is all the time inspiring you
to work is the chisel that is cutting out your
portrait. The higher the motive, the higher

206 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

becomes the sculpturing hand which is fashioning
your features. If the motive is the highest, the
lineaments are being painted to represent all the
beauty of divine nobility.

That man's discipline in life is void who goes
on drudging and plodding, and doing things that
he does not want to do. He is born a clod.
From dust he came, and to dust he goes back.

He who knows how to do, daily, deeds that every-
body does, from the top of his head, is noble ; and
that which he achieves he achieves easily, be-
cause he has long been in the practice of acting
from the highest and noblest considerations.
Yalor, defiance of death, willingness to be sacri-
ficed for one's country — these are bred in men ;
but they were in them before the occasion found
them, or they would not have been developed -in
them.

SELF-GOVERNMENT.

it

XXIII.

SELF-GOVERNMENT.

Every machine, although when first invented it
seems to supersede the laborer, has the effect to
raise him one step higher. Every time an iron
muscle is invented, it gives emancipation to a
human muscle. Whenever you enslave a machine
that you have a right to hold in bondage, you set
free ten thousand slaves that you have no right
to hold in bondage.

Almost every influence in the world that is
working now, judging from hundreds of years to
hundreds of years, is flowing in one direction:
and that direction is toward the emancipation,
elevation, education and empowering of the great
mass of mankind. The tendency of religion is in

v CD

this direction. It has worked out one vein, and
hierarchies have had their day. It is taking on

210 MET A P HOBS AND SIMILES.

more democratic forms, and will take them on
from this time forth.

The attempt of Christian nations, at great ex-
pense and trouble, to civilize poor miserable bar-
barians, has a tendency to increase in the popular
estimation the value of men, without regard to
their accidents of condition or circumstance.
Man has risen in the market.

Down to the time of Cowper English literature
(particularly that part of it which comprises its
poems) was filled with a supercilious contempt
for the common people. The peasants, the yeo-
men, were treated as mats on which fine people
might rub their feet and clean their shoes, being
considered as good for nothing in themselves,
and serviceable only by reason of their relation to
the upper classes.

Government is not a thing to be chosen, except
so far as necessity is itself a choice. Adaptation
is a kind of generic choice. As ignorance dis-

SELF-GO VEBNMENT. 211

appears, monarchies disappear ; and as ignorance
comes back, monarchies come back.

The same reason that compels the Crown to
divide its power with the higher classes will go
on, steadily compelling these higher classes to
admit fresh sections into the upper circle.

In every generation tyranny contracts its sphere;
and now we see preparations for a higher type of
government.

The discovery of the use of steam was the poor
man's benefactor, for it has lifted him ten degrees
where it has the rich man one.

Xow^ the poor man has better food than the
rich man used to have. There is not a truckman
in New York who does not live better than
Alexander did. We should think ourselves
treated worse than the prisoners at Sing-Sing7
if we had to live as royalty did three or four
hundred years ago.

212 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

The spirit of humanity, the appreciation of
human worth under a rough exterior, and a
desire for the welfare of every man, sprang
up within the last hundred years. Literature
throughout the world has been growing purer,
and to-day it is at least human, if not spiritual.

More and more every year pictures are coming
to be owned by persons of moderate or slender
means, because they have an appetite for beauty
and must have beauty to feed it.

God's hand, like a sign-board, is pointing
toward the elevation of mankind, and saying,
"This is the way, walk ye in it." The road is
very muddy in some spots, and the march will be
slow, but the progress will be in one way.
Though it be like the march into summer out of
winter, or the march of Israel into the promised
land out of Egypt, self-government will at last be
reached.

GENEROSITY AND BENEVOLENCE.

XXIV.

GENEROSITY AND BENEVOLENCE.

Experience teaches us that there is nothing in
the world so cheap as giving. If a poor man
comes to my door, and I give him a quarter, and
send him away, I buy my own peace with that
quarter. To take my hat and go with him to the
miserable den where he lives, and explore the
history of his case, and ascertain what his wants
are, and institute a systematic remedy for his
troubles which shall relieve them, not for to-day
merely but for his whole life — that would be
benevolence. It is a cheap commutation to give
him a quarter and turn him off.

Generosity is the kindness of the lower nature ;
benevolence is the kindness of the higher nature.
The one carries with it the sense element ; the
other carries with it the soul element. Gener-
osity is the kindness of our bodily life and the

216 METAPHORS AND SIMILES.

faculties which are more immediately connected
with it ; benevolence is the kindness of the soul-
life and the faculties belonging to it.

Separated from generosity, benevolence runs
into mischiefs different from the mischiefs of
exclusive generosity, but as real. The two things
ought to be married. It is not good for either to
be alone. Generosity has its benefits if rightly
affianced to benevolence, and benevolence has its
bene (its if rightly affianced to generosity. Bach
by itself has peculiar evils. Benevolence separ-
ated from generosity is apt to become cold to
present suffering, and to come into sympathy
with abstract principles more than with real
human life ; and at last it comes to be a spirit of
inhumanity, inexorable for the general good, but
indifferent to the particular.

Generosity is the militia that enlist for three
months, while benevolence is the regular force
that enlist for the war.

This world is to be disenthralled, regenerated ;

GENEROSITY AND BENEVOLENCE. 217

it is to be developed from age to age, and more
and more ; but its regeneration and development
can not be accomplished by evanescent spurts of
generosity.

Men whose kindness is shallow, men who, every
hour of the day, do something, though what they
do is no deeper than their palm or their pocket,
always have the reputation of being noble natures;
while other men who give their time, their
thought, their feeling, their very life, and have
nothing else to give, are looked upon as, com-
paratively speaking, uncharitable.

It takes generosity to begin with, and benevo-
lence to end with, one leading on to the other,
and both acting harmoniously. United, they
keep each other healthy.

COMPLETE LIST of the OFFICIAL COURT REPORTERS
of the UNITED STATES, Showing Nearly One-Half to
be Writers of Gkaham's Staxdaed Phonography.

An accurate list of the OFFICIAL Court Reporters of all the States
having laws for their appointment, was compiled in 1893.. and conclu-
sively settled the question as to which system is most generally
used by the expert reporters of this country. In addition to this
list there are hundreds of expert reporters who write the Graham
system and do court and general reporting in all the States and Terri-
tories. A copy of the list will be sent free to any address on application
to us.

How is it possible to present more convincing evidence of the great
superiority of the Graham system, which for thirty-seven years has
been subjected to the most thorough tests ?

Total number whose systems are known, 635.
Totals of each System that has Five Peh Ce>*t. or moke of 635 :
Graham. . . . 305 [48 per cent, of 635] ^^iMH^BHi^
Bexs- Pitman- 77 [12 " " ] ymi

ATr>-sox 71 [12 " " ] mm

Isaac Pitman 41 [ 6| " " ] «

Graham, mixed with other systems, 32.

UNSOLICITED TESTIMONIALS FROM EXPERTS.

From Prof. T. J. Ellinvrood, Official Reporter of Henry TVard
Beecher's Discourses for 30 Years.

•• I had frequent opportunities for observing the ease and accuracy
with which he [Andrew J. Graham] performed feats of reporting that
were impossible to the ordinary stenographer: and so convinced was
I of the many advantages afforded by his method that I adopted it;
and ever since I have felt greatly indebted to him for his numerous
valuable devices, which have enabled me. as a shorthand writer and
teacher, to do my wort with far greater facility and satisfaction than
I could otherwise have done it."

From the Official Reporters of the Gen'l Conference of the 31. E.

Cliurch. Omaha. Neb., May IS. 1892 .

We, the undersigned, members of the Staff of Official Keporters of
the Quadrennial General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, esteem it a great privilege to testify, that, after many years
of experience in shorthand writing, we find ourselves fully satisfied
with Graham's Standard Phonography. We have had individual ex-
perience varying from twelve to thirty-five years in shorthand writ-
ing. We have had much work to do in ecclesiastical, literary, scien-
tific, legal, and other forms of reportorial work, and have found, that
rhe more closely we held to the general principles of Standard Pho-
nography, the better we succeeded in our work.

We are agreed that, to the best of our knowledge, no system of short-
hand equals that of Standard Phonography in its beauty, brevity, or
conciseness of expression, and general harmony of the principles'pre-
sented. (Signed) Wm. D. Bridge. Chief of Staff.

G. G. Baker, Member of Staff.

D. Lee Auetmak. Member of Staff.

Joh>- J. Hell, Member of Staff.

PRICE-LIST of ANDREW J. GRAHAM & CO.,

744 Broadway, N. Y.

MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS AND ARTICLES.

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The Little Teacher. — Comprises : 1. The Outline, presenting ail
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Standard-Phonographic Dictionary.—" The last great crowning
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ANDREW J. GRAHAM & CO., PUBLISHERS,

744 Broadway, New York.

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