“We ought to check in the series of our thoughts everything that is
without a purpose and useless, but most of all the over curious feeling
and the malignant; and a man should use himself to think of those things
only about which if one should suddenly ask, ‘What hast thou now in thy
thoughts?’ with perfect openness thou mightest immediately answer, ‘This
or That;’ so that from thy words it should be plain that everything in
thee is simple and benevolent, and such as befits a social animal, and
one that cares not for thoughts about sensual enjoyments, or any rivalry
or envy and suspicion, or anything else for which thou wouldst blush if
thou shouldst say thou hadst it in thy mind.”
So, with a stringent practicalness worthy of Franklin, he discourses on
his favorite text, _Let nothing be done without a purpose_. But it is
when he enters the region where Franklin cannot follow him, when he
utters his thoughts on the ground-motives of human action, that he is
most interesting; that he becomes the unique, the incomparable Marcus
Aurelius. Christianity uses language very liable to be misunderstood
when it seems to tell men to do good, not, certainly, from the vulgar
motives of worldly interest, or vanity, or love of human praise, but
“that their Father which seeth in secret may reward them openly.” The
motives of reward and punishment have come, from the misconception of
language of this kind, to to be strangely overpressed by many Christian
moralists, to the deterioration and disfigurement of Christianity.
Marcus Aurelius says, truly and nobly:—
“One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down
to his account as a favor conferred. Another is not ready to do this,
but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he
knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know what he
has done, _but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks
for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit_. As a
horse when he has run, a dog when he has caught the game, a bee when it
has made its honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call
out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine
goes on to produce again the grapes in season. Must a man, then, be one
of these, who in a manner acts thus without observing it? Yes.”