ght comfortable
kind of 'wine-and-walnuts philosophy' for themselves, this
of Supply-and-demand or another; and keep saying, during hours
of mastication and rumination, which they call hours of
meditation: "Soul, take thy ease; it is all _well_ that thou art a
vulture-soul;"--and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest
before they are aware!

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the
union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his
deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the
end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent to reflect on
this;--does he think that a Land Aristocracy when it becomes a Land
Auctioneership can have long to live? Or that Sliding-scales will
increase the vital stamina of it? The indomitable Plugson too, of the
respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot,
is invited to reflect on this; for to him also it will be new, perhaps
even newer. Book-keeping by double entry is admirable, and records
several things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep
their Tablets; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a recording;
and things, as my Moslem friends say, are 'written on the iron leaf.'

Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally: did you
never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson droning to you,
glance into your New Testament, and the cash-account stated four times
over, by a kind of quadruple entry,--in the Four Gospels there? I
consider that a cash-account, and balance-statement of work done and
wages paid, worth attending to. Precisely _such_, though on a smaller
scale, go on at all moments under this Sun; and the statement and
balance of them in the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's
Chancery are discrepant exceedingly;--which ought really to teach, and
to have long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of
Undershot, much more an unattackable _un_common-sense Grace of
Rackrent, a thing or two!--In brief, we shall have to dismiss the
Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place: we shall have to know, on
the threshold, that either there is some infinitely deeper Gospel,
subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly corrective, to the Cash
one; or else that the Cash one itself and all others are fast
travelling!

* * * * *

For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them; to have some
Soul i