g on the
fluctuations of the market, are all forms of gambling. They are all
animated by the desire to get something for nothing: a desire which we
can respect when a helpless pauper asks for alms; but of which in any
form an able-bodied man ought to be ashamed.

THE PENALTY.

+The shame of cowardice.+--Man is meant to be superior to things outside
him. When we see him bowing down to somebody whom he does not really
believe in; when we see him yielding to forces which he does not himself
respect; when living is more to him than living well; when there is a
threat which can make him cringe, or a bribe that can make his tongue
speak false--then we feel that the manhood has gone out of him, and we
cannot help looking on his fall with sorrow and with shame. The penalty
which follows moral cowardice is nowhere more clearly stated than in
these severe and solemn lines which Whittier wrote when he thought a
great man had sacrificed his convictions to his desire for office and
love of popularity:

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore!

Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains,--
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone, from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame.

CHAPTER XI.

Nature.

Thus far we have been considering the uses to which we may put the
particular things which nature places at our disposal. In addition to
these special uses of particular objects, Nature has a meaning as a
whole. The Infinite Reason in whose image our minds are formed and in
whose thought our thinking, so far as it is true, partakes, has
expressed something of his wisdom, truth, and beauty, in the forms and
laws of the world in which we live. In the study of Nature we are
thinking God's thoughts after him. In contemplation of the glory of the
heavens, in admiration of the beauty of field and stream and forest, we
are beholding a loveliness which it was his delight to create, and which
it is elevating and ennobling for us to look upon. Nature is the larger,
fairer, fuller expression of that same intelligence and love which wells
up in the form of consc