l*i y 
 
 
 
 r^^fy 1 
 
 
 v?K^ 
 
 
 j~rj*~i\ >*' 
 
 
 «* 
 
 
 
 
 #3 
 
 -4J^v5>1V\iO , > 
 
iWASH^ggS 
 
 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 : 
 
 " wretched state ! 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 w r rongs 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, u O 
 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, u For 
 
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-dav 1 ' ? 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-Sing 7 
 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. 
 
 PREPAID 
 
 * A Book of Prayer (by H.W. Beech er, portrait) cl. $0.75 $0.75 
 *Bible Studies (by Henry Ward Beecher), cloth 1.50 1.50 
 
 Brief Longhand .60 .60 
 
 Envelopes — per package - - - - .10 .10 
 
 Alphabet (Phonographic). Lord's Prayer (Keporting Style). 
 Glance at Phonography. Christian Names. 
 
 Lessons to an Ex-(Benn)-Pitmanite — cloth - .25 .25 
 
 paper .10 .10 
 
 * Metaphors and Similes — of H. W. Beecher - 1.00 1.(1) 
 Note-Books (for Pen or Pencil). 160 pages - .07 .13 
 Paper — Triple-Line {red lines), per quire - - .15 .20 
 
 " " per pkg., 5 quires .60 .85 
 
 per ream - - 2.10 3.00 
 
 [To points where the express rate is not over $5 per 100 lbs., 
 
 a ream can be sent cheaper by express than by mail.] 
 
 *Payne's Business Letter Writer - - - .50 .50 
 
 Pencils (Graham's Exporting) — per dozen - .50 .50 
 
 per half-gross - 1.70 1.90 
 
 per gross - 3.4.0 3.80 
 
 Pens (Graham's Phonographic), steel, per gross 1.00 1.00 
 
 " per doz. .10 .12 
 
 Phonographic Numerals - - - - - .15 .15 
 
 Sumner's ' ' Shorthand & Keporting ' ' — part engr'd .10 .10 
 STUDENT'S JOURNAL— 
 Memorial Number (June, '94), containing Por- 
 trait, Biographical Sketches andEac-similes 
 
 ofthe Reporting Notes of Prof. A. J. Graham .10 .10 
 
 Vols. I to V — odd numbers only, per number .20 .20 
 
 VI to XXIV— bound, each - - 1.75 1.95 
 
 VI, VII, VIII— in one vol., half leather 3.50 3.75 
 
 IX, X, XI— in one vol., half leather - 3.50 3.75 
 
 XII, XIII, XIV— in one vol., half leather 3.50 3.75 
 
 XV, XVI, XVII— in one vol., half leather 3.50 3.75 
 
 XVIII, XIX, XX— in one vol., half leather 3.50 3.75 
 
 For above five volumes, if ordered at one time 15.00 15.00 
 
 Vol. XXV, 1896. Subscription - - - 1.00 1.00 
 
 The Student's Journal Binder - - .40 .60 
 *The Hidden Manna and the White-Stone (by H. 
 W. Beecher, with Appendix by Mrs. Beecher; 
 and with portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Beecher). 
 
 Embossed paper .20 .20 
 
 * These books do not relate to nor contain shorthand. 
 
Price-list of A. J. GRAHAM & CO., 744 Broadway, X. Y. 
 
 WOKKS ON STANDABD PHONOGKAPHY 
 
 AND OTHER SUBJECTS 
 
 BY 
 
 Andeew J. Geaham, A. M. 
 
 " Mr. Graham is eminently expert in his profession. He has devoted 
 his life to the perfection of the art of reporting. By his books, 
 lessons, and various efforts, he has done more to perfect Phonography 
 than any living reporter." — Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 The Little Teacher. — Comprises : 1. The Outline, presenting ail 
 the chief elements of Standard Phonography in eight primer-size 
 pages : 2. The Little Reading Exercises — furnishing in 16 little 
 pages an exercise on each section of the Outline. 3. Miniature 
 edition of the Correspondent's List of Word-Signs, Contractions, 
 Phrase-Signs, Prefixes, and Affixes of the Corresponding Style. 
 4®= The Little Teacher is a useful pocket companion for students 
 of the Synopsis or Hand-Book. Price, cloth, 40 cts. ; paper, 25 cts. 
 
 The Synopsis. — New and Revised edition. — Comprises : 1. The Syn- 
 opsis (in 29 duodecimo pages) of all the Principles of the Corres- 
 ponding Style, unmistakably presented, with numerous engraved 
 illustrations. 2. "The Correspondent's List" — 12mo edition — 
 comprising an alphabetical list of Corresponding W T ord-Signs, Con- 
 tractions, Phrase-Signs, Prefixes, and Affixes. 3. " The Reading 
 Exercises" — in which there is an extended illustration and appli- 
 cation of each section of the text ; followed by several pages of 
 connected reading matter, with an interlined translation. This 
 edition is well adapted to the use of either Classes or Private Stu- 
 dents. JiST This is a highly useful book for students of the Hand- 
 Book, in making frequent reviews of the elements. — Price, 50 cts. 
 
 The Hand-Book. — New and Revised edition. — Presents every prin- 
 ciple of every style of the Art in such a Form and Manner, with 
 such Fullness of Explanation and Completeness of Illustration, 
 and with such other features as to fully adapt the work to the use 
 of Schools and to Self -Instruction. 400 duodecimo pages (52 being 
 engraved exercises), to which are appended 41 pages of a Brief 
 Phonographic Dictionary. Price, bound in muslin, with embossed 
 side-title, $2.00 ; post-paid, $2.10. 
 
 "Full, Concise, and Philosophical in its development of the 
 theory of writing by sound, Admirable in its arrangement, and Re- 
 plete with Improvements and refinements on the Art as previously 
 defined, it affords the learner a safe means of obtaining a speed in 
 reporting at least one fourth greater than can be acquired by any other 
 method." — New York Herald. 
 
 First Reader. — New and Revised Edition : Stereographed in the Cor- 
 responding Style ; with interpaged Key ; with Questions ; and with 
 Notes. $1.75 ; postpaid, $1.81. 
 
 Second Reader. — New and Revised Edition : Stereographed in the 
 Reporting Style, with Key and Notes. To be studied in connection 
 with the Reporting-Style chapter of the Hand-Book. $1.75 ; post- 
 paid, $1.81. 
 
Price-List of A. J. GRAHAM & CO., 744 Broadway, N. Y. 
 
 Standard-Phonographic Dictionary.—" The last great crowning 
 work of the Standard Series," gives the pronunciation and the 
 best outlines (Corresponding, Advanced-Corresponding, and Re- 
 porting) of about 60,000 words, and the forms for about 60,000 
 phrases. Beyond comparison with any shorthand dictionary or 
 vocabulary ever published. Invaluable to writers of either style. 
 Cloth, $5 ; full leather, $6 ; genuine morocco, $7 ; Octavo-form 
 (from the same plates), with wide margins, cloth, $6 ; leather, $8 ; 
 morocco, $9. 
 
 The Reporter's List. — With engraved forms, combining in one list, 
 in chart-like form, and in phonographic-alphabetical order, all the 
 Word-Signs, Contractions, etc., contained in lists in the Hand-Book, 
 and with many thousand other words for comparison, conteast, 
 and distinction, with explanations in the corresponding style. 
 1,000 engraved pages and 139 pages of common print, consisting 
 of Preface, Introduction, Notes, and Index. The Index is arranged in 
 the common-alphabetical order, which permits the easy findiDg of 
 any word or phrase in the book. A very valuable work. Total 
 number of pages, 1,139. Price, cloth, $3.50 ; leather, $4.50 ; mor- 
 occo, $5.50. 
 
 Practice-Book Series. — UCS = Unvocalized Corresponding Style. En- 
 graved in the Advanced-Corresponding Style, with Key and Ques- 
 tions and Notes. Very useful for practice in reading or writing 
 without the vowels. Composed of short articles on scientific and 
 literary matters. Very interesting and instructive. 12mo, 122 
 pages. Cloth. Price, $1.25. 
 ICR= Intercolumn Reporting Style. A series of Business Letters en- 
 graved in the Reporting Style in one column, and in the adjoining 
 column (most convenient for reference), Key, Notes, and Ques- 
 tions. Many of these letters were received from phonograph ers, 
 having been dictated to them by their employers, and furnish a 
 great variety of subjects and styles of composition. This book 
 will prove invaluable to the student preparing for office work. 
 12mo, 166 pages. Cloth. Price, $1.25. 
 
 Lady of tlie Lake—By Sir Walter Scott. With Frontispiece. Stereo- 
 graphed in the Advanced-Corresponding Style, with interpaged 
 Key ; and with Notes. Total number of pages, 328. Price, $1.50 ; 
 Morocco, $3.00. "A beautiful poem, beautifully engraved in 
 phonography." 
 
 PERIODICAL VOLUMES. 
 
 The Student's Journal. — A monthly 20-page quarto devoted to 
 Standard Phonography, has been published continuously since 1872. 
 The Student's Journal is the oldest and best phonographic journal in 
 America. Each number has eight pages of lithographed phonography. 
 News of importance to phonographers, portraits, biographical sketches, 
 and fac-similes of the reporting notes of prominent phonographers, 
 are frequently given. Subscription price, $1 per year. For list of 
 bound volumes of the Journal, see Price List of Miscellaneous Books 
 and Articles. Sample copy, five cents. 
 
 ANDREW J. GRAHAM & CO., PUBLISHERS, 
 
 744 Broadway, New York. 
 
5^a«^ 
 
 
 ^fe^^^® 
 
 
 
 
 ^^s^^SS 
 
 ^§^s^fel 
 
 
 iPliliiv^ 
 
 
 
 ^^^^^M^^^&5 
 
 ^^S^^^ 
 
 §ife? 
 
 
 ^£§5j 
 
 
 <^n? 
 
 in 
 
 MS 
 
^ 
 
 *& 
 
 ■x& 
 
 ^sSs 
 
t,!^.^ Y 0F CONGRESS 
 
 021 066 404 A