acquaintance with many truths, without being admitted to the familiarity
of embracing or shaking hands with one. If they have native stamina of
animal constitution, they may become men of passions and opinions, but
they never will become men of sentiments and ideas; they may know the
truth as it is _about_ a thing, and support it with acrid and wrangling
dogmatism, but they never will know the truth as it is in the thing,
and support it with faith and insight. And the moment they come into
collision with a really live man, they will find their souls inwardly
wither, and their boasted acquisitions fall away, before one glance of
his irradiating intelligence and one stroke of his smiting will. If, on
the contrary, they are guided by good or great sentiments, which are the
souls of good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to organize
all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character;
but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they
will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will
weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will
intrench itself in pretence and deception. If they are in the learned
professions, they will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine,
formalists in divinity, though _regular_ practitioners in all; and
clients will be cheated, and patients will be poisoned, and parishioners
will be--we dare not say what!--though all the colleges in the universe
had showered on them their diplomas. "To be weak is miserable": Milton
wrested that secret from the Devil himself!--but what shall we say of
those whose weakness has subsided from misery into complacency, and who
feel all the moral might of their being hourly rust and decay, with the
most amiable indifference and lazy content with dissolution?

Now this weakness is a mental and moral sickness, pointing the way to
mental and moral death. It has its source in a violation of that law
which makes the health of the mind depend on its activity being directed
to an object. When directed on itself, it becomes fitful and moody;
and moodiness generates morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and
misanthropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the work of
self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man will despise himself, if he
concentrates his attention on that important personage! The joy and
confidence of activity come from its being fixed and fastened on things
external to