CIRCUMSTANCE PROVIDENCE. 217 Is it a friend? I doubt, though he speak with the voice of a brother. Yes, I could find in my heart to cry, in spite of my Elspie, Would that the armies indeed were arrayed, O where is the battle! Backed by a solemn appeal, ' For God's sake do not stir, there! ' Clough. I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. Emerson. Sure enough, of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path for every man, a thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do ; - which could he be led or driven to do, he were then doing 'like a man,' as we phrase it; all men and gods agreeing with him, the whole Universe virtually exclaiming Well done to him! His success, in such case were complete; his felicity a maximum. This path, to find this path and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him. Whatsoever forwards him in that, let it come to him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty; whatsoever hinders him, were it ward-motes, open-vestries, 15 VOL. II. 218 MAN RULES AND FOLLOWS CIRCUMSTANCES. pollbooths tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery. Carlyle. Good people will learn a lesson in any but is it the best lesson? circumstances One of the righteous, in a dream, saw a king in paradise, and a parsă, or holy man, in hell. He questioned himself, saying: What is the cause of the exaltation of this, and the degradation of that; for we have fancied their converse. A voice came from above, answering: This king is in heaven because of his affection for the holy, and that parsa is in hell because of his connection with the kingly :- What can a coarse frock, rosary, and patched cloak avail? abstain from such evil works as may defile thee; there is no occasion to put a felt cowl upon thy head; be a darwesh in thy actions, and wear a Tartarian Sadi. coronet. Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible to rule external circumstances, and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them. Life lies before us, as a huge quarry lies before the architect; he deserves not the name of an architect, except when, out of this fortuitous mass, he can combine, with the greatest economy and fitness, and durability, some form, the pattern of which originated in his spirit. All things without us, nay I may add, all things on us, are mere elements; but deep within us lies the creative force, which, out of these can MAN RULES AND FOLLOWS CIRCUMSTANCES. 219 produce what they were meant to be- and which leaves us neither sleep nor rest, till in one way or another, without us or on us, that same have been produced. You, my dear niece, have, it may be, chosen the better part; you have striven to bring your moral being, your earnest lovely nature into accordance with itself and with the Highest; but neither ought we to be blamed, when we strive to get acquainted with the sentient man in all his comprehensiveness, and to bring about an active harmony among his powers. Goethe. Je suis les conduites ordinaires de la bonne petite prudence humaine, croyant meme que c'est par elle qu'on arrive aux ordres de la Providence. Sévigné. 66 Though thinking," said Stanton, "was the best work open to me, we all have a consciousness that 'to do is nobler than to think." On the other hand, "we ought to stand still and see what God will do for us." Oakfield. Then said his Lordship, "Well, God mend all!" "Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it, said the other. Quoted by Carlyle. One evening after a weary march through the desert, as Mohammed was camping with his followers, he overheard one of them saying, "I will loose my camel, and commit it to God." On which he took him up: "Friend, tie thy camel, and commit it to God." Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk therein. To learn or be taught what work he actually was able for, and then by permission, persuasion and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honor, liberty, and maximum of well-being: if liberty be not that, I, for one, have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman; his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my Senior, Seigneur, my Elder, Presbyter or Priest - if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better 6 than I what is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brasscollars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! Carlyle. There are many kinds of slavery — to ideas to feel ADVANTAGES TO SOCIETY OF TRANSMISSION. 221 ings to prejudices to shadows. Better be the slave of the meanest circumstance than "feel the weight of chance desires." Undisciplined men must be under some master. The law of transmissive qualities and proclivities is essential to the permanence and the very existence of society. Unless the peculiar genius and dispositions of parents were produced anew in their descendants through successive generations, what would humanity present but a mass of heterogeneous and discordant atoms? Societies, states, and nations could not be formed out of them and perpetuated. But suppose the law of descent were abolished. Let the fathers have no guarantee that they shall live again in their children. Let every man come into being with the thread of history cut from behind him, commencing an existence original and de novo, without the peculiar loves and aptitudes of his ancestry or his tribe, and society at once is resolved into a wretched individualism, with which all progress must stop forever; and all the accumulations of past wisdom and experience must be lost in a hopeless and endless chaos. Suppose, for instance, the transmitted tastes and tendencies of the Pilgrim were to cease with the present generation in New England, and the next generation were to come upon the stage, not with the inborn conatus of ancestry, but each individual with his own original proclivities, like Frenchmen, Chinamen, or promiscuously what you please. The past two hundred |