f looking at things; asks himself Which debt
must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the
debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?
For you, O broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me,
commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the
aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like
you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on
the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though
slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts
without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to
the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt
but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or
a banker's?

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices:--

"Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right."

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains
to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of
omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees
that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done,
without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of
all actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our
crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple
of the true God!

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the
predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature,
and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the
principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left
open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor
hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead
any when I