ies all the professions,
who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits
a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a
hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no
shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life,
but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let
a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are not leaning
willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of
self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh,
born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be ashamed of our
compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws,
the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more
but thank and revere him;--and that teacher shall restore the life of
man to splendor and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association;
in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy
office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks
for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses
itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and
miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less
than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of
life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding
and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good.
But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It
supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as
the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in
all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it,
the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in
Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god
Audate, replies,--

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods."

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets