ls all bliss, and lose your life,
Your barren unit life, to find again
A thousand times in those for whom you die--
So were you men and women, and should hold
Your rightful rank in God's great universe,
Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature,
Naught lives for self. All, all, from crown to base--
The Lamb, before the world's foundation slain--
The angels, ministers to God's elect--
The sun, who only shines to light the worlds--
The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers--
The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves
Flee the decay of stagnant self-content--
The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe--
The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower--
The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms
Born only to be prey to every bird--
All spend themselves on others: and shall man,
Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot
Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound,
As being both worm and angel, to that service
By which both worms and angels hold their life,
Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt,
Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him?
No; let him show himself the creatures' Lord
By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice
Which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure."

My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-geology shall help
to teach you this, or anything like this; I think that though it may not
make you more happy, it may yet make you more wise; and, therefore, what
is better than being more happy, namely, more blessed.

HEROISM

It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralizing us; and
that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection of
justice and safety, the complete "preservation of body and goods," may
not reduce the educated and comfortable classes into that lap-dog
condition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of us
all. Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; we
find it more convenient to hire people to take care of us. So much the
better for us, in some respects: but, it may be, so much the worse in
others. So much the better; because, as usually results from the
division of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to
take care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast
amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to the
weak: for which last