ongregation 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 Compens