"How high, beneficent, sternly inexorable, if forgotten, is the
duty laid, not on women only, but on every creature, in regard to
these particulars!"--T. CARLYLE.
The delicate ladies on Beacon Street, who order their ices and creams
flavored with vanilla or pear-juice, may not know that bituminous coal,
rope-ends, and creosote, furnish a larger proportion of the piquant
seasoning than the blossoming bean or the orchard-tree; but every man of
science does.[11]
Already the chemist furnishes the attar of Cashmere from heaps of offal
that lie rotting by the way. It is as if God forced man face to face
with every repellent fact of nature, and said, "Slake thy thirst at this
turbid fountain, child of the dust; or the purer streams of the hillside
shall trickle for thee in vain."
Somewhat so, I am compelled to turn your eyes to the most repulsive
side of human life. I do not do it willingly, but of a necessity; not
because I like it, but because it is essential to the argument. May the
contact prove, that the perfumed joy of later years has disguised
itself, for both of us, in the rotting accumulations of our social life!
It rests with yourselves to decide. These lectures may be useless; they
may fill your minds with painful details, open hideous vistas, and blind
you to the tempting, heavenward ways which we love to see the young and
beautiful pursue.
But, in such case, the responsibility is not mine. _I_ would have you
look on vice, that you may learn to loathe it; _I_ would have you
realize, that what a noble friend of ours has called the "perishing
classes" are made of men and women like yourselves.
Bidding you trust, to a certain extent, to the truth of those terrible
statistics that crush Thomas Henry Buckle in their grasp, I would still
have you remember, that, beside the active laws of moral and material
life, there is ever the living God immanent in the world; and that it is
always for _you_ to change the results of history, at any given era,
according to the great first law,--none the less real because so often
forgotten,--that this living God helps or hinders you as you will, and
becomes, at any moment that you choose, an important element in each
calculation.