n is both
sculptor and quarry,--and a great noise and dust of chiselling is there
sometimes in his bosom. If, therefore, we find in him somewhat which
does not immediately and actively sympathize with his moral nature, let
us not fancy this element equally out of sympathy with his pure destiny.
The impulsion and the resistance are alike included in the design of our
being. Hunger--to illustrate--respects food, food only. It asks leave to
be hunger neither of your conscience, your sense of personal dignity,
nor indeed of your humanity in any form; but exists by its own
permission, and pushes with brute directness toward its own ends. True,
the soul may at last so far prevail as to make itself felt even in
the stomach; and the true gentleman could as soon relish a lunch of
porcupines' quills as a dinner basely obtained, though it were of
nightingales' tongues. But this is sheer conquest on the part of
the soul, not any properly gastric inspiration at all; and it is in
furnishing opportunity for precisely such conquest that the lower nature
becomes a stairway of ascent for the soul.

And now, if in the relations between every manly spirit and the world
around him we discover the same fact, are we not by this time prepared
to contemplate it altogether with dry eyes? What if it be true, that
in trade, in politics, in society, all tends to low levels? What if
disadvantages are to be suffered by the grocer who will not sell
adulterated food, by the politician who will not palter, by the
diplomatist who is ashamed to lie? For this means only that no one can
be honest otherwise than by a productive energy of honesty in his own
bosom. In other words,--a man reaches the true welfare of a human
soul only when his bosom is a generative centre and source of noble
principles; and therefore, in pure, wise kindness to man, the world
is so arranged that there shall be perpetual need of this access and
reinforcement of principle. Society, the State, and every institution,
grow lean the moment there is a falling off in this divine fruitfulness
of man's heart, because only in virtue of bearing such fruit is man
worthy of his name. Honor and honesty are constantly consumed _between_
men, that they may be forever newly demanded _in_ them.

We cannot too often remind ourselves that the aim of the universe is
a personality. As the terrestrial globe through so many patient
aeons climbed toward the production of a human body, that by this
all-c