omprehending, perfect symbol it might enter into final union with
Spirit, so do the uses of the world still forever ascend toward man, and
seek a continual realization of that ancient wish. When, therefore,
Time shall come to his great audit with Eternity, persons alone will be
passed to his credit. "So many wise and wealthy souls,"--that is what
the sun and his household will have come to. The use of the world is not
found in societies faultlessly mechanized; for societies are themselves
but uses and means. They are the soil in which persons grow; and I no
more undervalue them than the husbandman despises his fertile acres
because it is not earth, but the wheat that grows from it, which comes
to his table. Society is the culmination of all uses and delights;
persons, of all results. And societies answer their ends when they
afford two things: first, a need for energy of eye and heart, of noble
human vigor; and secondly, a generous appreciation of high qualities,
when these may appear. The latter is, indeed, indispensable; and
whenever noble manhood ceases to be recognized in a nation, the days of
that nation are numbered. But the need is also necessary. Society must
be a consumer of virtue, if individual souls are to be producers of it.
The law of demand and supply has its applications here also. New waters
must forever flow from the fountain-heads of our true life, if the
millwheel of the world is to continue turning; and this not because the
supernal powers so greatly cared to get corn ground, but because the
Highest would have rivers of His influence forever flowing, and would
call them men. Therefore it is that satirists who paint in high colors
the resistances, but have no perception of the law of conversion into
opposites, which is the grand trick of Nature,--these pleasant gentlemen
are themselves a part of the folly at which they mock.

As a man among men, so is a nation among nations. Very freely I
acknowledge that any nation, by proposing to itself large and liberal
aims, plucks itself innumerable envies and hatreds from without, and
confers new power for mischief upon all blindness and savagery that
exist within it. But what does this signify? Simply that no nation can
be free longer than it nobly loves freedom; that none can be great in
its national purposes when it has ceased to be so in the hearts of its
citizens. Freedom must be perpetually won, or it must be lost; and this
because the sagacious Manager o