s, queries, added by
any man's hand who reads. Meaning this, it means also much more than
this,--far more than the mere letter of "right of way." It is a fine
courtesy of recognition that no one page shall ever say the whole of its
own message; be exhaustive, or ultimate, even of its own topic; determine
or enforce its own opinion, to the shutting out of others. No matter if
the book live and grow old, without so much as an interrogation point or a
line of enthusiastic admiration drawn in it by human hand, still the
gracious import and suggestion of its broad white spaces are the same.
Each thought invites its neighbor, stands fairly to right or left of its
opponent, and wooes its friend.

Thinking on this, we presently discover that margin means a species of
freedom. No wonder the word, and the thing it represents, wherever we find
them, delight us.

We use the word constantly in senses which, speaking carelessly, we should
have called secondary and borrowed. Now we see that its application to
pages, or pictures, or decorations, and so forth, was the borrowed and
secondary use; and that primarily its meaning is spiritual.

We must have margin, or be uncomfortable in every thing in life. Our plan
for a day, for a week, for our lifetime, must have it,--margin for change
of purpose, margin for interruption, margin for accident. Making no
allowance for these, we are fettered, we are disturbed, we are thwarted.

Is there a greater misery than to be hurried? If we leave ourselves proper
margin, we never need to be hurried. We always shall be, if we crowd our
plan. People pant, groan, and complain as if hurry were a thing outside
of themselves,--an enemy, a monster, a disease which overtook them, and
against which they had no shelter. It is hard to be patient with such
nonsense. Hurry is almost the only known misery which it is impossible to
have brought upon one by other people's fault.

If our plan of action for an hour or a day be so fatally spoiled by lack
of margin, what shall we say of the mistake of the man who leaves himself
no margin in matters of belief? No room for a wholesome, healthy doubt? No
provision for an added enlightenment? No calculation for the inevitable
progress of human knowledge? This is, in our eyes, the crying sin and
danger of elaborate creeds, rigid formulas of exact statement on difficult
and hidden mysteries.

The man who is ready to give pledge that the opinion he will hold
to-morrow wil