m with what we are. The
sensualist, or the man of the world, at any rate is not the victim of fine
words, but pursues a reality and gains it. The Philosophy of Utility, you
will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it,--it aimed
low, but it has fulfilled its aim. If that man of great intellect who has
been its Prophet in the conduct of life played false to his own
professions, he was not bound by his philosophy to be true to his friend
or faithful in his trust. Moral virtue was not the line in which he
undertook to instruct men; and though, as the poet calls him, he were the
"meanest" of mankind, he was so in what may be called his private capacity
and without any prejudice to the theory of induction. He had a right to be
so, if he chose, for any thing that the Idols of the den or the theatre
had to say to the contrary. His mission was the increase of physical
enjoyment and social comfort;(17) and most wonderfully, most awfully has
he fulfilled his conception and his design. Almost day by day have we
fresh and fresh shoots, and buds, and blossoms, which are to ripen into
fruit, on that magical tree of Knowledge which he planted, and to which
none of us perhaps, except the very poor, but owes, if not his present
life, at least his daily food, his health, and general well-being. He was
the divinely provided minister of temporal benefits to all of us so great,
that, whatever I am forced to think of him as a man, I have not the heart,
from mere gratitude, to speak of him severely. And, in spite of the
tendencies of his philosophy, which are, as we see at this day, to
depreciate, or to trample on Theology, he has himself, in his writings,
gone out of his way, as if with a prophetic misgiving of those tendencies,
to insist on it as the instrument of that beneficent Father,(18) who, when
He came on earth in visible form, took on Him first and most prominently
the office of assuaging the bodily wounds of human nature. And truly, like
the old mediciner in the tale, "he sat diligently at his work, and hummed,
with cheerful countenance, a pious song;" and then in turn "went out
singing into the meadows so gaily, that those who had seen him from afar
might well have thought it was a youth gathering flowers for his beloved,
instead of an old physician gathering healing herbs in the morning
dew."(19)

Alas, that men, in the action of life or in their heart of hearts, are not
what they seem to be in their moments of