thing but discontented? If he thinks that
things are going all right, must he not have a most beggarly conception
of what going right means? And if things are not going right, can it be
anything but good for him to see that they are not going right? Can
truth and fact harm any human being? I shall not believe so, as long as
I have a Bible wherein to believe. For my part, I should like to make
every man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with themselves,
even as I am discontented with myself. I should like to awaken in them,
about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that
divine discontent which is the parent, first of upward aspiration and
then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in
part. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be
ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all
virtue. Men begin at first, as boys begin when they grumble at their
school and their schoolmasters, to lay the blame on others; to be
discontented with their circumstances--the things which stand around
them; and to cry, "Oh that I had this!" "Oh that I had that!" But that
way no deliverance lies. That discontent only ends in revolt and
rebellion, social or political; and that, again, still in the same
worship of circumstances--but this time desperate--which ends, let it
disguise itself under what fine names it will, in what the old Greeks
called a tyranny; in which--as in the Spanish republics of America, and
in France more than once--all have become the voluntary slaves of one
man, because each man fancies that the one man can improve his
circumstances for him.

But the wise man will learn, like Epictetus the heroic slave, the slave
of Epaphroditus, Nero's minion--and in what baser and uglier
circumstances could human being find himself?--to find out the secret of
being truly free; namely, to be discontented with no man and no thing
save himself. To say not--"Oh that I had this and that!" but "Oh that I
were this and that!" Then, by God's help--and that heroic slave, heathen
though he was, believed and trusted in God's help--"I will make myself
that which God has shown me that I ought to be and can be."

Ten thousand a-year, or ten million a-year, as Epictetus saw full well,
cannot mend that vulgar discontent with circumstances, which he had
felt--and who with more right?--and conquered, and despised. For that is
the discontent o