nteriors of nature.
Providence has a wild rough incalculable road to its end, and 'it is of
no use to try to white-wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to
dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth
of a student of divinity.' But he only drew from the thought of these
cruelties of the universe the practical moral that 'our culture must
not omit the arming of the man.' He is born into the state of war, and
will therefore do well to acquire a military attitude of soul. There is
perhaps no better moral than this of the Stoic, but greater
impressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our teacher had been
more indulgent to the man's sense of tragedy in that vast drama in which
he plays his piteous part.

In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that horrid burden and
impediment on the soul, which the churches call Sin, and which, by
whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature
of man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the cruelty, the
utter despicableness to which humanity may be moulded. If he saw them at
all, it was through the softening and illusive medium of generalised
phrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 'the immoral
thoughtlessness' of men. The courses of nature, and the prodigious
injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He
will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible
Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substitutes a
fair-weather abstraction named Compensation. One radical tragedy in
nature he admits--'the distinction of More and Less.' If I am poor in
faculty, dim in vision, shut out from opportunity, in every sense an
outcast from the inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a
tragedy. 'But see the facts clearly and these mountainous inequalities
vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The
heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine
ceases. His is mine.' Surely words, words, words! What can be more idle,
when one of the world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, than
that he should betake himself to an altitude whence it is not visible,
and then assure us that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? This
is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration
round them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall be
loved,' who does not recall cases whi