Essays — Second Series
to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and
make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your
project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race,
understand well that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into
your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with
a belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to
learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring
us to prison, or to worse extremity.
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover
of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The
entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and
profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be
received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has
had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's innocence
and his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I
remember standing at the polls one day when the anger of the political
contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent
electors, and a good man at my side, looking on the people, remarked, "I
am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to
vote right." I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses of
men in their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that
in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great
number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent
to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he
refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think
you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the
authentic sign.
If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of
the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce
illustration in particulars of a man's equality to the Church, of his
equality to the State, and of his equality to every other man. It is
yet in all men's memory that, a few years ago, the liberal churches
complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of
Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a religious church
would not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg
is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the Church, but the Church
feels the accusation of his presence and belief.
It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets to make it
appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation.
The man whose part is taken and who does not wait for society in
anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar
experiment called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column
of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man
to the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis, on hearing the lives of
Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read, "judged them to be great men
every way, excepting, that they were too much subjected to the reverence
of the laws, which to second and authorize, true virtue must abate very
much of its original vigor."
And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so he
is equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men are
superficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a man
lays himself open to his brother, apprises each of their radical unity.
When two persons sit and converse in a thoroughly good understanding,
the remark is sure to be made, See how we have disputed about words! Let
a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man knows among his friends,
converse with the most commanding poetic genius, I think it would appear
that there was no inequality such as men fancy, between them; that a
perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolished
differences; and the poet would confess that his creative imagination
gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one that he could
express himself and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack,
which might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers of
truth; for they know the tax of talent, or what a price of greatness the
power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of
the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary.
Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want
of skill in other directions has added to his fitness for his own work.
Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity,
and every hindrance operates as a concentration of his force.
These and the like experiences intimate that man stands in strict
connection with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over
and behind us, and we are the channels of its communications. We seek
to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits which contradicts
what we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self
within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals.
In vain we compose our faces and our words; it holds uncontrollable
communication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes
the spirit. We exclaim, 'There's a traitor in the house!' but at last it
appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel
to the highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet,
yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and
although I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I
know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your
questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question,
What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing,
present, omnipresent. Every time we converse we seek to translate it
into speech, but whether we hit or whether we miss, we have the fact.
Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence
that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for
contemplation forever.
If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in
time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and
foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with
the man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his
native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood,
but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads
and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our success when
we obey it, and of our ruin when we contravene it. Men are all secret
believers in it, else the word justice would have no meaning: they
believe that the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos
would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not after the
design of the agent. 'Work,' it saith to man, 'in every hour, paid or
unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward:
whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so
only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn
a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter how often
defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is
to have done it.'
As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how
this high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles
himself into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that
every stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and
carries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned,
we need not interfere to help it on: and he will learn one day the mild
lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and we need not
assist the administration of the universe. Do not be so impatient to
set the town right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the false
reputation of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder to
set the town right concerning themselves, and will certainly succeed.
Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of this
or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his
insufficiency to all men's eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into the
divine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only
liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection and a sense of
inferiority, and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we
eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only
by obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way
constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man and lead
him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.
That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is
cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations.
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly
conducted will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
All around us what powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of
custom, and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurologists
that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that
it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever
the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at
what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart
which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it
not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so
gently and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of
the past?