. Discontent is the want
of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can
thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the
evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to
them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of
imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting
them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of
fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the
self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues
greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out
to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and
apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and
scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him.
"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are
swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let
not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother,
because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of
his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new
classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power,
a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its
classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the
depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches
and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is
this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of
some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's
relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism.
The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new
terminology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth
and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil will
find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind.
But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, passes for
the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of
the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of
the universe; the luminaries of