as I hold, most loving and most
fatherly, though often severe--even to agony--but irresistible still--
till what they have really gained by fighting circumstance, however
valiantly, has been the MORAL gain, the gain in character?--the power to
live the heroic life, which

"Is not as idle ore,
But heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd, with the shocks of doom,
To shape and use."

Ah! if a man be learning that lesson, which is the primer of eternal
life, then I hardly pity him, though I see him from youth to age tearing
with weak hands at the gates of brass, and beating his soul's wings to
pieces against the bars of the iron cage. But, alas! the majority of
mankind tear at the gates of brass, and beat against the iron cage, with
no such good purpose, and therefore with no such good result. They fight
with circumstances, not that they may become better themselves, not that
they may right the wrongs or elevate the souls of their fellow-men, not
even that they may fulfil the sacred duty of maintaining, and educating,
and providing for the children whom they have brought into the world, and
for whom they are responsible alike to God and to man; but simply because
circumstances are disagreeable to them; because the things around them do
not satisfy their covetousness, their luxury, their ambition, their
vanity. And therefore the majority of mankind want to be, and to do, and
to have a hundred things which are not in their own power, and of which
they have no proof that God intends to give them; no proof either that if
they had them, they would make right use of them, and certainly no proof
at all that if they had them they would find peace. They war and fight,
and have not, because they ask not. They ask, and have not, because they
ask amiss, to consume it on their lusts; and so they spend their lives
without peace, longing, struggling for things outside them, the greater
part of which they do not get, because the getting them is not in their
own power, and which if they got they could not keep, for they can carry
nothing away with them when they die, neither can their pomp follow them.
And therefore does man walk in a vain shadow, and disquiet himself in
vain, looking for peace where it is not to be found--in everything and
anything save in his own heart, in duty, and in God.

But happy are they who are discontented with the divine discon