COMPENSATION

Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on

Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that on this subject

life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers

taught. The documents too from which the doctrine is to be drawn,

charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me,

even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our

basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the

dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence

of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also

that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of

the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the

heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love,

conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be,

because it really is now. It appeared moreover that if this doctrine

could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright

intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be

a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that

would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.

The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the

ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that

judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful;

that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from

Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life.

No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine.

As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they separated

without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by

saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that

houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by

unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a

compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the

like gratifications another day,—bank-stock and doubloons, venison and

champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is it

that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve men?

Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would

draw was,—‘We are to have _such_ a good time as the sinners have

now’;—or, to push it to its extreme import,—‘You sin now; we shall sin

by and by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we

expect our revenge to-morrow.’

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;

that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted

in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a

manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the

truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the

will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and

falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day

and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally

they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has

gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has

displaced. But men are better than their theology. Their daily life

gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine

behind him in his own experience, and all men feel sometimes the

falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they

know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought,

if said in conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a

man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he

is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the

dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own

statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts

that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my

expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in

darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in

male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and

animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the

animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the

undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal

gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce

magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at

the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,

you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that

each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,

spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;

upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire

system of things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat

that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and

woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each

individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the

elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in

the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures are

favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and every

defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from

another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged,

the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in

power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic or compensating

errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate

and soil in political history are another. The cold climate

invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers

or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every

excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its

sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of

pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its

moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of

folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else;

and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase,

they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much,

Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the

estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their

loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize

themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down

the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on

the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong and fierce for

society and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian,

with a dash of the pirate in him?—Nature sends him a troop of pretty

sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the

village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to

courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar,

takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President

has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his

peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short

time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to

eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or,

do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius?

Neither has this an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is

great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that eminence. With

every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear

witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives him

such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the

incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he

all that the world loves and admires and covets?—he must cast behind

him their admiration, and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth,

and become a byword and a hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build

or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

_Res nolunt diu male administrari_. Though no checks to a new evil

appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel,

the governor’s life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will

yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will

not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the

government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an

over-charge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer

flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost

rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with

great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under all

governments the influence of character remains the same,—in Turkey and

in New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt,

history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture

could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in

every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the

powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the

naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse

as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a

tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character

of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims,

furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other.

Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world

and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human

life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its

end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all

his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find

the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears,

taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction

that take hold on eternity,—all find room to consist in the small

creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of

omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and

cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every

point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the

repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which

within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its

inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. “It is

in the world, and the world was made by it.” Justice is not postponed.

A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. Ἀεὶ γὰρ εὖ

πίπτουσιν οἱ Διὸς κύβοι,—The dice of God are always loaded. The world

looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which,

turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its

exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is

told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong

redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the

universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.

If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you

know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a

twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in

the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the

retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the

soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding;

it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time

and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific

stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they

accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is

a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which

concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot

be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end

preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we

seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,—to

gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs

of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the

solution of one problem,—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual

strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep,

the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper

surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a _one end_, without

an _other end_. The soul says, ‘Eat;’ the body would feast. The soul

says, ‘The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul;’ the body

would join the flesh only. The soul says, ‘Have dominion over all

things to the ends of virtue;’ the body would have the power over

things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would be

the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,—power, pleasure,

knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up

for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in

particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress that he may be dressed;

to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to

be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think

that to be great is to possess one side of nature,—the sweet, without

the other side, the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day it

must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted

water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant

things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as

soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve

things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside

that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. “Drive out

Nature with a fork, she comes running back.”

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek

to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they

do not touch him;—but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in

his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another

more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance,

it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the

retribution is so much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts

to make this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment

would not be tried,—since to try it is to be mad,—but for the

circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and

separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases

to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual

allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the

mermaid’s head but not the dragon’s tail, and thinks he can cut off

that which he would have from that which he would not have. “How secret

art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only

great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal

blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!”[1]

[1] St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of

history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in

literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but

having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they

involuntarily made amends to reason by tying up the hands of so bad a

god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one

secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his

own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them:—

“Of all the gods, I only know the keys

That ope the solid doors within whose vaults

His thunders sleep.”

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral aim.

The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem

impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was

not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though

Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable;

the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him.

Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on

his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot

which it covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in

every thing God has made. It would seem there is always this vindictive

circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which

the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free

of the old laws,—this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying

that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things

are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the

universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies they said are

attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress his

path they would punish him. The poets related that stone walls and iron

swords and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of

their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan

hero over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword

which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded

that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the

games, one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to throw it

down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal and

was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought

above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer

which has nothing private in it; that which he does not know; that

which flowed out of his constitution and not from his too active

invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not

easily find, but in the study of many you would abstract as the spirit

of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early

Hellenic world that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias,

however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest

criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in a given

period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the

interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ

whereby man at the moment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of

all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the

statements of an absolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like

the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.

That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow

the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in

proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit,

the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and

workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as

omnipresent as that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another.—Tit for tat; an eye for an

eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure; love

for love.—Give and it shall be given you.—He that watereth shall be

watered himself.—What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take

it.—Nothing venture, nothing have.—Thou shalt be paid exactly for what

thou hast done, no more, no less.—Who doth not work shall not eat.—Harm

watch, harm catch.—Curses always recoil on the head of him who

imprecates them.—If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the

other end fastens itself around your own.—Bad counsel confounds the

adviser.—The Devil is an ass.

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is

overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We

aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act

arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of

the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his

will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word.

Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown

at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower’s bag. Or rather it

is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of

cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown,

it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. “No man had ever a point

of pride that was not injurious to him,” said Burke. The exclusive in

fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment,

in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not

see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut

out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as

well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own.

The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of children, of

the poor. The vulgar proverb, “I will get it from his purse or get it

from his skin,” is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily

punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations

to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as

water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect

diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any

departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that

is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as

far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is

war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust

accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all

revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he

appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he

hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws

are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded

and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird

is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be

revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly

follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of

cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the

instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a

noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the

balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot

and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small

frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any

thing who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he

gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor’s

wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant

acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of debt on the other;

that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in the

memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction alters

according to its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come

to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden

in his neighbor’s coach, and that “the highest price he can pay for a

thing is to ask for it.”

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that

it is the part of prudence to face every claimant and pay every just

demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first

or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for

a time between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must

pay at last your own debt. If you are wise you will dread a prosperity

which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for

every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who

confers the most benefits. He is base,—and that is the one base thing

in the universe,—to receive favors and render none. In the order of

nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or

only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line

for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much

good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it

away quickly in some sort.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the

prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon,

a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is best

to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to

gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation; in the

house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent,

good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your

presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of the

dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no

cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.

For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and

credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited

or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue,

cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be

answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure

motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the

knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains

yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you

shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to

the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of

the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give

and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price,—and if that

price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and

that it is impossible to get any thing without its price,—is not less

sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the

laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I

cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those

processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle

on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule,

which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the

history of a state,—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom

named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a

hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world

persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for

truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a

rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime,

and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals

in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and

mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the

foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or

clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and

substances of nature,—water, snow, wind, gravitation,—become penalties

to the thief.

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right

action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,

as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has

absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so

that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against

Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from enemies

became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence,

poverty, prove benefactors:—

“Winds blow and waters roll

Strength to the brave, and power and deity,

Yet in themselves are nothing.”

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever

a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a

defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable

admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his

feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns

destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As

no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against

it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or

talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph

of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper

that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain

himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the

wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms

itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and

stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.

Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he

is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he

has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns

his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation

and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his

assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak

point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin and

when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is

safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all

that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success.

But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one

that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to

which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander

believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into

himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,

defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are

not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of

wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition

that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be

cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at

the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The

nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the

fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to

loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in

your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer The payment is

withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound

interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,

to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no

difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob

is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and

traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the

nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are

insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would

whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and

outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It

resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the

ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their

spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every

lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious

abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every

suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to

side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always arriving to

communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen and the martyrs

are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is

all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has

its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not

the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these

representations,—What boots it to do well? there is one event to good

and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I

gain some other; all actions are indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own

nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.

Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow

with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence,

or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast

affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all

relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are

the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same.

Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on

which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, but no

fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work

any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse

not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the

criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and does not come to a

crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning

confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore

outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie

with him he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be a

demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but, should we

not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude

must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty

to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I

properly _am;_ in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into

deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding

on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to

knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the

purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,

never a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our

instinct uses “more” and “less” in application to man, of the _presence

of the soul_, and not of its absence, the brave man is greater than the

coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less,

than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue, for

that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any

comparative. Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert

or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But

all the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had if paid for in

nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head

allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example to

find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens.

I do not wish more external goods,—neither possessions, nor honors, nor

powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But

there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists and that

it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene

eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn

the wisdom of St. Bernard,—“Nothing can work me damage except myself;

the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real

sufferer but by my own fault.”

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of

condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of

More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation

or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and

one feels sad and knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns

their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It

seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly and these mountainous

inequalities vanish. Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in

the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of

_His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my brother and my brother is

me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet

love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the

grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my

guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I

so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to

appropriate all things. Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul,

and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain.

His virtue,—is not that mine? His wit,—if it cannot be made mine, it is

not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break

up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a

nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity

quitting its whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and

faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case,

because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new

house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions

are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant and all

worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a

transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and

not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates

and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there

can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man

of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time,

a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his

raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not

advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this

growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not

see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters

of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper

eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in

to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the

ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs,

nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We

cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and

weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, ‘Up and onward for

evermore!’ We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the

new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who

look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the

understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a

mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of

friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure

years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The

death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but

privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for

it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an

epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up

a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the

formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It

permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the

reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the

next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny

garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its

head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is

made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide

neighborhoods of men.

IV.

SPIRITUAL LAWS

The living Heaven thy prayers respect,

House at once and architect,

Quarrying man’s rejected hours,

Builds therewith eternal towers;

Sole and self-commanded works,

Fears not undermining days,

Grows by decays,

And, by the famous might that lurks

In reaction and recoil,

Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil;

Forging, through swart arms of Offence,

The silver seat of Innocence.