way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society
are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our
Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck.
We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving
at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all
virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is
very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will
come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them.
Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will
lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead
weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and
beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but
it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut
up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children
to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and
modes of living seem a travesty of truth. Our society is encumbered by
ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which
the Romans built over hill and dale and which are superseded by the
discovery of the law that water rises to the level of its source. It is
a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing
army, not so good as a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly
appointed empire, quite superfluous when town-meetings are found to
answer just as well.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways.
When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf
falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man
and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of
strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so forth, are done
by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun,
star, fall for ever and ever.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of
a machine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows how
knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The simplicity
of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible.
The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man's wisdom by his
hope, knowing that the perception of the inexha