th 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 traveling!

For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them; to
have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body
unputrefied. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul,
place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body
with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould,
modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last
beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!--O, if you could
dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his
place! One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned.
Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with
steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than
Working, take it how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in
religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism there had
grown,--a 'glorious Chivalry,' much besung down to the present
day. Was not that one of the 'impossiblest' things? Under the
sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and
hellfire eyes, hacking one another's flesh; converting precious
living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses
of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a
Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not
hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth
considering by and by.

I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the
Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting