slave, do you think
there is no payment but in money? There is a payment which Nature
rigorously exacts of men, and also of Nations, and this I think when
her wrath is sternest, in the shape of dooming you to possess money. To
possess it; to have your bloated vanities fostered into monstrosity
by it, your foul passions blown into explosion by it, your heart and
perhaps your very stomach ruined with intoxication by it; your poor life
and all its manful activities stunned into frenzy and comatose sleep by
it,--in one word, as the old Prophets said, your soul forever lost by
it. Your soul; so that, through the Eternities, you shall have no
soul, or manful trace of ever having had a soul; but only, for certain
fleeting moments, shall have had a money-bag, and have given soul and
heart and (frightfuler still) stomach itself in fatal exchange for
the same. You wretched mortal, stumbling about in a God's Temple, and
thinking it a brutal Cookery-shop! Nature, when her scorn of a slave is
divinest, and blazes like the blinding lightning against his slavehood,
often enough flings him a bag of money, silently saying: "That! Away;
thy doom is that!"--

For no man, and for no body or biggest multitude of men, has Nature
favor, if they part company with her facts and her. Excellent
stump-orator; eloquent parliamentary dead-dog, making motions, passing
bills; reported in the Morning Newspapers, and reputed the "best speaker
going"? From the Universe of Fact he has turned himself away; he is gone
into partnership with the Universe of Phantasm; finds it profitablest
to deal in forged notes, while the foolish shopkeepers will accept
them. Nature for such a man, and for Nations that follow such, has her
patibulary forks, and prisons of death everlasting:--dost thou doubt
it? Unhappy mortal, Nature otherwise were herself a Chaos and no Cosmos.
Nature was not made by an Impostor; not she, I think, rife as they
are!--In fact, by money or otherwise, to the uttermost fraction of a
calculable and incalculable value, we have, each one of us, to settle
the exact balance in the above-said Savings-bank, or official register
kept by Nature: Creditor by the quantity of veracities we have done,
Debtor by the quantity of falsities and errors; there is not, by any
conceivable device, the faintest hope of escape from that issue for one
of us, nor for all of us.

This used to be a well-known fact; and daily still, in certain edifices,
steeple-houses, j