res up to the splendor of a moon or
a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,
peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his
genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal
can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going
about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer
philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When
Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the
sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned
several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched
the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great
desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the
earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did
not shine for a year.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It
is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man
was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good,
I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the
African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and
ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should
get some of his good done to me--some of its virus mingled with my
blood. No--in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be
starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch
if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that
will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the
broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man
in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a
hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a
philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good
to me, or the like of me.

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at
the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being
superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were
superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; a