II.

LIFE.

THE WORTH OF LIFE.

No, life is not contemptible, is not odious; it is to be held as a trust, as a solemn gift, with the possession of which are linked high responsibilities. It is a greater thing to value than to despise life; even as they only are the learned, who lament those inestimable manuscripts which the royal officers ignorantly burned for fuel, at that time when the abbeys were suppressed. Life is no commonplace matter; it may feel so, when we are disappointed, when we are wearied with labor, or are disgusted with meanness, and then we may say with the Jewish preacher, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!' But myself, how often in my more cheerful moments, and at those more thoughtful seasons, when my awakened faculties have made me most truly man, have I been awe-struck and breathless, whilst the great mystery of life has occurred to my mind in sudden vividness! In such moments what

a miracle have I felt myself! Excepting God himself, what is there more wondrous than the existence of the

finite amid the infinite; than this birth of feeling, thinking, and active life in our bosoms, which a short while since, were inanimate, insensate dust! What thought is there more wondrous than this, that we are living souls, abroad and active on the face of a world which was once without form and void! Well might the sons of God shout for joy, when the first man of our race stood up erect amid the trees of Eden! It was the birth of mortal spirit, and that Paradisaical wonder is repeated in the growth of every infant and throughout the life of every man !

Religion doth make us revere life, and rightly. For consider how the mind is formed. Is it not by the discipline of life; by our bodily necessities, and our social relations ? An infant, secluded in a dark closet, and duly fed, would grow up to manhood, but would be as helpless and simple as a babe. Every object a child sees doth increase its knowledge; and every accident which it bemoans doth correct its experience. It is thus that knowledge, principles, and character are formed. Even were our capacities to remain the same, and were the Almighty to diminish the facts and events which befall us, our knowledge and our worth would be diminished proportionately.

By merely blinding us to the lessons of nature, God could reduce mankind to the ignorance of brutes. Nay, in a certain sense, this life is one long conference with the Deity, prior to our admittance into heaven. We, on our parts, pray; and God, on his, doth instruct, warn, remonstrate, and encourage us perpetually. The Gospel is his word; and the movements of nature, divine signs

and symbols are they all for human instruction. Verily, the most impatient to quit life are the least fitted; since it is little experience they can have had of its moral design. Men would not be so hasty to abandon the world, either as monks or as suicides, did they but see the jewels of wisdom and faith which are scattered so plentifully along its paths; and lacking which no soul can come again from beyond the grave to gather. Mountford.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Thoreau.

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life makes all times and places indifferent to a dead man. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power that fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually

Next to us is not the workman whom

being executed.

we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. Thoreau.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance which his growth requires who has so often to use his knowledge?

Ib.

I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will you help God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

lb.

Surely if we deduct all those days of our life which we might wish unlived, and which abate the comfort of those we now live; if we reckon up only those days which God

NOT THE SOUL ONLY, BUT THE MAN INTERESTING. 259

hath accepted of our lives, a life of good years will hardly be a span long. Sir Thomas Browne.

It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it.

Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. Emerson.

"The spirit of itself" says Hugo of St. Victor, "is termed spirit—and in connection with the body, it is called soul. The human soul, because it can exist both in the body and out of it, is called in the ecclesiastic offices, soul and spirit." Ages of Faith.

To Socrates and Plato, as to the old Jewish sages, man is most important when regarded not merely as a soul, but as a man, a social being of flesh and blood. Aristotle declares the family and social relations to be the masterfacts of humanity. Kingsley.

It is a duty to take a thorough part in life, both in its sweetest and bitterest moments, and to oppose to its outward impressions the deep inward persuasions of our own