ers' or
'Destroyers.'

"Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far
as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of
good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of
destruction and of sorrow.

"Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic
of plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the
record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy.
But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of
it, the work of every man, 'qui non accepit in vanitatem animam suam,'
endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at
last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin,
the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground;
by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely
sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation,
in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night,
there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the
perfect day.

"And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the
beauty of Holiness must be in labor as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it
may be, in labor; in our strength, rather than in our weakness; and in
the choice of what we shall work for through the six days, and may know
to be good at their evening time, than in the choice of what we pray for
on the seventh, of reward or repose. With the multitude that keep
holiday, we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone up to the house of
the Lord, and vainly there asked for what we fancied would be mercy; but
for the few who labor as their Lord would have them, the mercy needs no
seeking, and their wide home no hallowing. Surely goodness and mercy
shall follow them, all the days of their life, and they shall dwell in
the house of the Lord--For Ever."[51]

FOOTNOTES:

[44] "Vulgarly"; the use of the word "scientia," as if it differed from
"knowledge," being a modern barbarism; enhanced usually by the
assumption that the knowledge of the difference between acids and
alkalies is a more respectable one than that of the difference between
vice and virtue.

[45] _Modern Painters_, volume iii. I proceed in my old words, of which
I cannot better the substance, though--with all deference to the taste
of those who call that book my best--I could, the expression.

[