Classic Audiobook Collection - Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil by William Henry Smith ~ Full Audiobook [philosophy]

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil by William Henry Smith audiobook. Genre: philosophy Set in and around the English countryside village the author calls Gravenhurst, this reflective Victorian work follows an observant country gentleman as he records a chain of walks, visits, and drawing-room conversations that keep circling back to one stubborn question: if the world contains so much beauty, why does it also contain so much pain? As his friends debate what they have seen in their own lives, the book ranges widely across everyday experience and big ideas alike: bodily suffering and painful emotion, the sense that there is simply 'too much' evil, and the tangled problem of moral evil - the harms people choose to do. From there, the discussions turn to whether some evils can be remedied through education, social progress, and wiser institutions, and what might be beyond human power to fix. Along the way, Smith considers inequality of happiness, crime and punishment, and the strange way struggle seems bound up with human development. Written in a calm, accessible style, Gravenhurst blends moral psychology, social observation, and Christian-minded theodicy, inviting listeners to test their own convictions about responsibility, compassion, and the grounds for hope. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:19:45) Chapter 02 (00:42:46) Chapter 03 (01:03:25) Chapter 04 (01:13:59) Chapter 05 (01:29:37) Chapter 06 (01:47:00) Chapter 07 (02:02:59) Chapter 08 (02:17:38) Chapter 09 (02:44:57) Chapter 10 (03:05:40) Chapter 11 (03:37:48) Chapter 12 (04:02:34) Chapter 13 (04:31:53) Chapter 14 (04:54:46) Chapter 15 (05:24:26) Chapter 16 (05:48:06) Chapter 17 (06:12:26) Chapter 18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

gravenhurst or thoughts on good and evil by william henry smith introduction part one i call this somewhat irregular essay on a very old subject by the name of the place in which it was written because allusions to that place and its inhabitants and some conversations with neighbouring friends have crept into it one evening when returning from my walk through a village which at least in these pages bears the name of gravenhurst i found myself meditating on the old problem of good and evil and that apparently disproportionate amount of evil which is often perplexed profoundest thinkers and which is often startled into thought the most simple-hearted of men when suffering themselves under any sharp calamity. A visit paid to a poor woman in distress, and a conversation held with a dear old friend who keeps alive in me the habit of philosophical discussion, had led my thoughts in this direction. It was the hour of sunset. As I paused upon the parapet of our little bridge, the distant Welsh hills were glowing in their purple splendor. The river ran gold at my feet. Every branch of every graceful tree that hung silently in the air received and reflected a new beauty from that entire scene,

of enchantment, to which also it brought its own contribution. Such harmony there is in nature. The whole which is formed itself of separate parts gives to each part its meaning and its charm. Yet even here, in this scene of enchantment, I was compelled to recall to my imagination that poor woman whose desolate hearth I had lately visited. I was compelled to revive those discordant scenes of war, of carnage, of treachery, of famine, which my friend, an old Indian general had been dilating upon. No harmony then, and little peace in this other world of humanity. Is there truly some diabolic element amongst us? Does disorder reign in the highest part of creation? Has the beneficent harmony which human nature should disclose been invaded, broken up,

irrecoverably destroyed by some tyrannist spirit of evil? It seems so. And yet, I reflected within myself, since wherever science has penetrated, disorder and confusion disappear, and a harmonious whole is presented to us, it may happen that this sense of diabolical confusion in the arena of human life would vanish before the light of a wider and clearer knowledge. We suffer, there's no doubt of that, and we naturally speak and think under the sharp pang of our present agony, but the ultimate and overruling judgment which we form of human life should be taken from some calm, impersonal point of view, we should command the widest horizon possible of the great whole of humanity we see but little at a time. We pause sometimes on the lights

only of the picture, sometimes only on the shadows. How very dark those shadows seem, yet, if we could embrace in our view the whole of the picture, perhaps the very darkest shadows might be recognized as effective or inevitable portions of a grand harmonious whole. Could we obtain, I said to myself, some vantage ground from which to apprehend all the laws which govern this habitable globe, or rather the laws which both make it to be a habitable globe, and also run through all the life that inhabits it? Could we perceive clearly all the relations which man bears to the rest of nature, and which man bears to his fellow man, through which two classes of relations, all his energies are developed. Could we also survey

humanity as it unfolds in the course of ages, and learn how the past has begotten the present, how the present is preparing for the future? Could we, in short, from our vantage ground, see the whole as it has been, is, and will be, that whole which discloses itself in time as well as in space, I feel persuaded that we should find, in human life, the same complete harmony that science traces in other parts of creation. I feel persuaded that we should have a spectacle before us whose tendency would be to silence, complaint, and prompt and enlighten our efforts,

individual and social, after a more complete happiness. I returned home with thoughts like these coursing through my mind, and for several months the subject haunted me. Now, when a great topic of this kind takes full possession of you, every trivial event that occurs in your neighborhood seems to have a bearing on it, or to illustrate some aspect of it. Every person seems to be talking of it or referring to it, and you yourself are apt to lead the conversation of your friends

to subjects which have more or less connection with the main theme that occupies your mind. During these months, all Gravenhurst seemed to be perplexing itself with the problem of good and evil. Some of the conversations of my friends I jotted down at the time and mingled with my own more didactic exposition. When I finally came to revise my papers, I put these conversations apart. It appeared the better plan to commence with an uninterrupted exposition of my own views,

and then add these conversations by way of supplement, which would contain further illustration, further development or application of some of the statements in the former part. Thus much it was necessary to say in order to account for the form which this little book has ultimately taken. As to the views which it puts forth, I need hardly disclaim for them any boast of novelty or originality. if I have succeeded in giving a distinct statement to truths which are floating indistinctly in many minds,

I shall not have written in vain. I have no paradox to startle or amuse the reader with. My statements are simply those which must grow up in the scientific age in which we live. The optimism that could boldly declare that this was the best of all possible worlds does not belong to an age which recognizes the limits of its knowledge. He who talks of the best possible of worlds should be able to, to compare many worlds together. What we in these times are saying to ourselves is that this only world we know anything about is essentially one, one great scheme in which the lower or the simpler is a necessary condition of the higher or more complex, and that it is idle to quarrel with this or that

part unless you can quarrel with the whole, or unless you can separate that portion, which is the object of your criticism, from the great laws or powers that constitute the whole. You take up some one part of this great scheme of nature and of man, and you, a sensitive human being, exclaim against it as pain and suffering and denounce it as evil. All this is quite inevitable, but what you exclaim against as evil is often the very excitement of your highest energies, and is always found on examination to be linked, either as cause or effect with what you as loudly proclaim to be good. You suffer and you resist and strive against your calamity, and perhaps this strife is the

for which you suffered. But take away both the suffering and the strife, and you simply destroy the web of human existence. Tear this web to pieces, and you have, behind it, nothing, nothing for human knowledge. How can I, or anyone, venture to assert that this is the best of all possible worlds? There may be innumerable worlds and innumerable modes of consciousness, of which we can form no conception, whatever. What we can safely assert is this, that our world of nature and of man is one great scheme, and that what we most lament in human life as well as what most astonishes us amongst physical phenomena, is a consequence of some general law essential to the whole. And furthermore, we can assert that, if not the happiest of all possible worlds,

happiness and not misery, is the great end and result, the great outcome of this multifarious scheme. This subordination of evil to good may be proved, not only by enumerating the instances in which good comes out of evil, and comparing them with the instances in which evil comes out of good, a process which I should despair of completing, but by seizing hold of certain great laws or facts of human life which show that provision is made for happiness of a quite different nature than can be said to be made for misery. There is a susceptibility to pleasure for pleasure's sake, whereas the susceptibility to pain has always the character of means to end, or is the consequence of some abnormal condition.

There is a universal delight in energy and activity of all kinds, so that there is joy blended with existence itself, for is not all life activity of some description? Thus pain when it acts as a stimulant to activity is lost, in the pleasurable energy it excites. Again, the sentiment of beauty which diffuses so much subtle happiness over all parts of life and which gives origin to the fine arts, and makes the world we live in a constant source of pleasure to the eye,

cannot be said to be balanced or neutralized by the opposite sentiment of ugliness. Hardly a plainer indication could be given that joy and not grief is the purpose of our world. I presume that we may speak of the world having a purpose, then this wide diffusion of the sentiment of beauty. General considerations of this kind are sufficient to demonstrate, if this really needed demonstration, that happiness preponderates over misdemeanor. I have no scales in which to weigh the pains against the pleasures, the joys against the sorrows of mankind. I cannot even gather the individual suffrages of men. I know that orators and poets,

eloquent writers of all ages, have delighted to describe life in the saddest of colors, and something I may have hereafter to say of this eloquent and poetic melancholy. I must here appeal to the testimony of broad and patent facts. Men evidently prefer. life to death, quite independently of the mere instinctive preservation of life, they prefer to live. This is demonstrated by the prospective care they take of life and the trouble they give themselves to procure and preserve the several pleasures of existence. The industry of the world, its laws, its morality, all prove that life is dear to man. Why should we labor? Why should we make laws and institute governments? Why keep a constant watch and exercise a stringent control over

each other's conduct, if human life, the object of all this care, were worth nothing. The scheme is one. We are parts of one great whole. We men are not creatures of some other planet brought to live in this. Whatever may be that soul or mind which constitutes us, man, nothing can be more plain than that it develops its marvelous consciousness in obedience to and by the aid of all those laws and forces which we call mechanical, chemical, and vital. We are born, We grow. We live according to the same laws that govern all the rest of the world. What is peculiar to man is not separable any more than the plant is separable from earth, air, and water. Nor are those laws and forces on which our very existence depends

interrupted or suspended for our behoof. How could they be? On their permanence, our very existence as breathing and thinking men depends. We live and move and have our being because these forces are an incessant activity. If their constancy is our life, how ask of them to be suspended for any of our life purposes, or even for the preservation of life itself? If the laws of chemistry afflict a man, he must reflect that by the laws of chemistry he lives. If he thinks he should have lived better, according to some other laws of chemistry, I must leave him to work out for himself the laws of this new chemistry. Do we ask why man is so liable to error and to passion, why his progress in knowledge or judgment is so slow? We have our only answer

in the very nature of human knowledge, or what we call the reason of man. The great inherent faculty of man is the power he has of transmuting his fragmentary experiences into general truths, which serve for guidance or for contemplation. But those fragmentary experiences must come first. Our first knowledge comes from the touch upon us of external matter. upon the eye as well as upon the hand, such first knowledge must be very imperfect or partial, though sufficient for the first purposes of life. What the senses immediately disclose are not those fundamental relations between things or atoms according to which material forces are invariably developed. These have to be learned by many processes of reasoning, through many

memories and comparisons. As to the knowledge which men obtain of themselves, and that reflection which is to control their own passions, it is evident that they must first live in order to have this knowledge of life. They must first live without the knowledge, live from spontaneous passion and instantaneous judgments, before they can live under the guidance of reflection or of systematized knowledge of what constitutes individual and social happiness.

The higher life must grow. Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, must grow out of guesses and experiments, refined sentiments and passion under the control of reason, these point at once to arts, inventions, mental discipline. A speculative man, who because of the violent passions and flagrant errors of mankind, pronounces that there is a defect of harmony and benevolence in the great scheme of humanity, stands convicted of this inconsistency. He allows that the more cultivated life he admires could not have arisen from the first relations man had with nature or his fellow man. And yet he quarrels with the savage or the half-civilized man for not living this cultivated life,

but for living that life which was a necessary prelude to it. He quarrels with those ungoverned passions and those fantastic errors which are the result of these earliest relationships, and which lay the foundation for governed passion and the search for truth. He allows at one moment that man, with certain propensities, and inherent powers of mind and brain develops himself here on earth, and the next moment he is, in fact, angry because some creature already perfectly developed has not descended from the skies. Meanwhile, violent passions and imaginative errors, which are the inevitable

antecedents to governed passions and scientific truth, do not prevent a human life from being upon the whole enjoyable. We need not much compassionate the past, and yet may congratulate the present, and hope still better for the future. The more we reflect on the great whole of nature and humanity, the more we are reconciled, not to evil as a thing to be patiently endured, wherever it can be remedied, but to a condition of things where there is the recognized evil, and the vigor to combat it. This contest with evil is our very progress, is our very life, it is one with all our effort and energy. This is no high-flown optimism. There is no paradoxical denial here of pain and suffering, but contemplations of this kind gird us up to fortitude

and to renewed efforts after happiness. It does not dismay me to discover that our energies are stimulated, our pursuits are in part initiated, our enthusiasms are almost always sustained, by what when we stand face to face against it, we must call evil. Evil, to him who has to resist or to endure, it undoubtedly is. In this form, it inevitably presents itself. But who does not see that human life regarded as a whole would be incalculably impoverished if the energy, the emotions, the aims which originate in the resistance to actual or probable evil, were abstracted from it. Yes, evil is with us, and in some form and degree must, I suppose, be always with us, even where it has been successfully combated, the apprehension of its return may still keep us on our guard.

But wherever there is intelligent resistance or manful endurance, the evil becomes transmuted into good. Do not ask for a world without evil. Seek rather to know and rightly appreciate this our own dark, bright existence, and enter heart and soul into the old warfare for the good. It is a noble life in which this contest is bravely and wisely sustained. Worlds there may be, where there is only pleasure and only goodness, but we can form no conception of such a state of things, or so far as we can form any conception,

it is a languid pleasure and a torpid goodness that rises to our imagination. It is not our supreme wisdom to pass life dreaming of a world where there will be no evil. It is highest wisdom, individually and socially, to do battle for the good, so that this mingled existence, which is alone intelligible to us, may put on all the glory it is capable of. From this contest we win our felicity and our progress, and the contest itself is a great and enduring happiness, which runs through all the ages of mankind,

all that is energetic and noble savers of this contest. I, even, what is tenderest in human life, comes out of some struggle between good and evil. Even our very piety springs from it. thus much for the general truth i wish to develop it will be seen that my sympathies have not been given to that class of thinkers who can discourse with untiring eloquence on every part and every aspect of nature organic and inorganic and on the harmonious arrangement which the whole displays till they ascend to man and there find ruin and confusion and hopeless disorder i rather agree with those who see throughout one great harmonious and progressive scheme who see how all in this world culminates in man and in the progressive intellect of man, who note how pain in suffering prompt his energies, how through error he ascends to truth, through passion, to self-government. Strange indeed would it be, if all nature manifested an admirable arrangement of parts

and an evident principle of growth till we arrived at the history of that conscious and reasoning being whose presence alone gives meaning and purpose to all the rest of nature. The unconscious world has its end or its complement in that conscious being, in whom it excites pleasure, perception, beauty, truth. Starting from his simplest appetites and passions, all of which have there allotted and apparently indispensable office in his further development, we see him rise into higher emotions, into higher and higher truths. Perhaps from the elevated station he finally reaches,

he looks down, with some displeasure and contempt, upon the lower elements of his own nature. Unwisely, if he does not recognize at the same time, the enormous debt he owes them, does not recognize in those lower elements the very basis of that intellectual structure he has reared, the higher may predominate over the lower, may even, when once developed, obtain an independent footing,

and yet, as we shall often have occasion to show, it never could have been in the first place, developed without the aid of the lower. The whole is one. End of Section 1, read by Sandra in Gravenhurst, Ontario at Trickle Downhouse. Section 2 of Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Gravenhurst or A Thoughts on Good and Evil by William Henry Smith. Introduction, Part 2. Thus much, I repeat, for the general view which I have to make clear and distinct, this will serve as keynote to our philosophy, and now let me say a word or two of the village of Gravenhurst, near to which I sit and write, and of the friends whose conversations I have here reported.

But after all, I cannot describe this Gravenhurst except by expressions which would serve equally well for hundreds of villages in England. It is a commonplace ordinary village, so much the better perhaps for me who have to treat of what is common in general amongst mankind. It is well to have under my eye a specimen easily examined of our ordinary pleasures, affections, miseries, errors, and truths. And I think that the more carefully such a specimen were examined, the more marvellous would human life appear.

I think, too, that such an examination would kindle in us a rational love of this human life, with unthinking men an enjoyment is less prized because it is widely diffused, because in fact it has the very qualities which ought to exalt it in our eyes, that of being universal and that of being habitual. It is commonplace, we say, but one who would form any fair estimate of the good and evil of existence must look out with fresh vision upon this commonplace of human life. Here is this village of Gravenhurst, now growing fast into a town, with its long, straggling street, its church, its chapel, its bridge over the river, its green fields through which that river flows, what could be more commonplace? The country, we, the inhabitants, think beautiful,

but it boasts of nothing to invite the stranger or the tourist, and the villages are certainly of a quite ordinary stamp. It has its outlying gentry, its clergy, its doctor, and here and there an exceptional character, a curiosity, as we say. If it had no curiosities of this kind, it would not be an ordinary village, but a most rare and unexampled one. But this village of Gravenhurst, seated among its fields and its pastures, with its sky and the moving clouds above it, and its infinite horizon, and its births, marriages, and deaths of most ordinary people, would be an endless theme for a poet or philosopher. To the man of genius, this commonplace of nature and of man is inexhaustible. The poet wants nothing else, and to the philosopher the frequency or generality of a fact or a

passion or a thought augments its value incalculably. I only wish I had the power given me to represent this commonplace in the glory and the novelty it sometimes reveals itself to me. I wish I had the power given me to teach some men whom I could name, strong-headed men perchance, but prone to ponder on the mere dust and dross of humanity, to look abroad with their hearts in their eyes, and note the beauty and the wonder there is in the daily spectacle and the daily passion of our lives. Commonplace? Look up.

What is that apparition of dazzling brightness rising softly upon the blue sky from behind those tall and massive elms? If you saw it for the first time in your life, you would say it must be some celestial visitant. Is it light itself from me? heaven taking shape and just softened and subdued to the endurance of a mortal vision. It is nothing but a cloud, mere vapor, that the unseen wind moves and molds, and that the sun shines on for a little time.

And now it has risen above the massive and lofty tree, and throws light upwards to the sky, and throws its pleasant shadow down upon the earth, pleasant shadow that paces along the meadows, leaving behind a greater brilliancy on tree and grass and hedge and flower than what for a moment it had eclipsed. It is all commonplace. Light and shadow and the river, the meadow with its clover blossoms and childish buttercups, very childish all. Match it. Match them. Match these trees in their meadows, ye restless prophets with your palaces of crystal and walls of sapphire, and paved of Jasper. I think there is no better lesson to teach us the beauty of the real and familiar

than to read, let us say, some great epic poet laboring to describe his imaginary bliss or his celestial city. He builds of Jasper and carbuncle and emerald, and lo he can produce nothing comparable to that thatched cottage standing in the corner of a field with the elm tree at its back. All the apocalyptic visions you have ever read cannot rival a meadow in springtime. That simple field with its buttercups and clover blossoms outshines the imagination of all the poet prophets that have ever lived. Thank God all you who have a spark of rational piety in your hearts for the glorious commonplace of earth and sky, for this cloud-em-en-bosomed planet in which you pass your lives. And a human commonplace of our Gravenhurst, the way we're

mortal creatures who are born and grow up and droop and die beneath the shadow of these mighty elms, do you know of any race or description of beings, more worthy of your admiration? I can well believe, as an abstract proposition, that in remote regions of the universe there are intellectual natures of a far higher order. But do you know anything of them? Can you draw any, intelligible picture of them? Until you can, these men, women, and children must take the highest place of all things known to you. An interesting race, these human beings. As I pass the meadow, I lean upon the gate that opens into it.

I see a little child, almost an infant, toddling alone in the high grass. The tall buttercups have outgrown the child. They and the ox-eyed daisies shut out from its view, that neighbouring cottage, which is its home. The child has lost its way amidst the flowers it had come to gather, knows not where to turn in this job, of soft grass. I hear a plaintiff cry of distress. Another child, some two years older, as I guess, runs to its aid, caresses and calms it, leads it back to the cottage home of both. How prettily it

protects, how proudly, seeing that this older one can look above the grass. You perceive that the little fond and sympathetic and imitative creature has learnt that tender care from their common mother, you note with a smile the already complex sentiment sense of power mingled with love revealed in that protection you observe how soon the threat of life and even where it is silken soft is spun of pain and pleasure you know moreover that beneath the that thatch of that cottage to which these children hand in hand are walking there beats some true and tender mother heart the source of all this love to one another some tender heart whose very anxieties you would hardly dare to diminish cottage or mention it is all the same these home relations exist everywhere and everywhere are the source of untold happiness it is pleasant to note that no distinction of wealth or station interferes with the love and homage of the child to the parent. The father is always the first of men. I have seen a little girl carry his dinner to the laborer in the field,

who sat under the hedge to eat it. No patriarch was ever waited on with a sweeter reverence. True. Where poverty degrades the man by rendering subsistence insecure, by compelling him to dishonorable means for obtaining it, the relations of the family may turn to gall and bitterness, which should give additional motive to one and all for expelling such form of poverty from the world. But honest labour and a rude, simple way of life, do not starve out the affections.

I observe a pride in the port, a tenderness in the eye of every man who presses a child to his bosom. There is no garment so thick or rude, but a child's finger penetrates it. The poorest man is monarch, by divine right, over one little loving substance. I know well that it is not always amidst flowers that man or child may lose our way in this world. Very thorny paths some of us tread, and nothing is more true than this, that suffering of some kind runs through the life of all, simple or sage. It mingles with the pleasures of sense. It ascends with us into the most lofty regions of thought. I need not say, therefore, that our gravenhurst has its share of miseries.

its wants, its sorrows, its crimes, perhaps under some roof, unknown to any of us, a terrible guilt or anguish may lie hid. But that which meets the eye everywhere, or most conspicuously, is labour, work of some kind, performed cheerfully, socially, habitually. There is a stolid content in the countenance of most men you meet. A more talkative and bustling activity distinguishes as the women, we, in common with all England and the greater part of Europe, have reached that stage of civilization and of culture, in which the necessary labors of life are undertaken with cheerful foresight, and where industry is a steadfast, voluntary habit. There is no savage impulse of sheer hunger, no savage sloth when the hunger is satisfied, and we have long

past that epoch when industry was sustained by the goad of the slave master. We have learned that health and pleasure lie hid in labor. We know that the toil which ministers to life is itself the best part of life. And we have a pleasant country to live and work in. No scenery, as I have said, to invite strangers to come to see it, but such beauty as, thank heaven, is bestowed lavishly over the surface of the earth. We have our river and undulating land, arable and pasture, and on the horizon the distant mountains of whales.

These and the clouds which we share with all the world catch for us the hues of sunrise and sunset, and together create for us not one, but many, lovely landscapes. But a beautiful country is made, first of all, to live in, not to look at as a picture. More than half our days spent unconscious of its charms. This is as it should be. Not to render idle was all this beauty of the earth given, nor do the idol enjoy it. To them it ceases to be lovely, grows weary, flat, stale and unprofitable. The peasant must fix his eye on the furrow which his plough is making. The blacksmith looks steadily at the red-hot iron who's hammering at his forge. The scholar must pour upon his book, but all from time to time look up, and the landscape is there to greet them.

trees are there, and their tremulous leaves seem to feel that we gaze upon them. Chiefly we pause at evening when the day's work is over, then the sun shines for a season as if rather to give beauty than to give light. He throws the hues of all the roses over us as he wishes us farewell. Of course we make our outcries against the miseries of life, and there is real evil and indisputable sorrow amongst us, but we strike down the evil where we can and we soothe the sorrow. where we can, and then this energy with which we strike, and this tenderness with which we soothe, I think we should not, after due deliberation, forfeit these for an immunity from pain and sorrow. Some evils, you will say, do not prompt to action, rouse no energy, are simply to be endured.

Well, this endurance conquers them, brings a strength and pride out of them. They prompt this energy of fortitude. I go back to the meadow where I saw the children amongst the flowers. Childhood itself shall give me my illustration. Some days afterwards I encountered the eldest one alone. She did not perceive me. I could watch her unobserved. There was a very luxuriant crop of nettles growing beside the hedge.

I saw her put her little tender hand slowly and deliberately to the leaf of the stinging nettle. She wanted to try if she could bear the pain. the grave little Spartan. I asked her she knew that the nettle stung. Oh, yes, she knew it, but added, blushing, partly with pain and partly at being observed. Mother says that unless we can bear pain, we shall be cowards and useless people. I wanted to try. It is not so very bad.

Ah, little Annie Foster, there was no need to go in search for the nettle. But you bore the trial well, and greater trials, I doubt not, you will bravely bear. again I draw the inference that there was a brave as well as tender mother be stirring herself under the thatch of that cottage. If anyone really asks the question whether in human life the amount of pleasure is greater than that of pain, I shall bid him look at his own Ravenhurst, wherever that may be, and frame the answer for himself. But I do not think that the question was ever seriously put,

Why is man more miserable than happy? The question has always run thus. Why so much misery in a being who might apparently have been much happier? I turn from this glance at the village, and its more homely inhabitants, to introduce my friend General Mansfield, to whom I have already made illusion, and whose authority I shall often invoke. He is by far the most remarkable man in our neighbourhood. I was going to say that he would be a remarkable man anywhere, but I am not sure that the expression would be correct. What is peculiar in the general is the completeness of his character and of his intellectual culture,

and remarkable men are, for the most part, those who have done some one extraordinary act, or cultivated some one faculty to an extraordinary degree. He served in India, both in a military and civil capacity. He has been a student. He has lived alone. He has lived in the Society of the Great. his experience of life has been as varied as his knowledge of books. His career in India took place before the Great Mutiny,

and the events in which he was concerned have therefore lost their importance, or at least their present interest. But he distinguished himself in more than one campaign, and having acted for some years as military secretary to the Governor-General, he has been also well-initiated into the affairs of civil government. but perhaps that part of his career which left the deepest traces on his mental culture were those early years in India, in which his professional duties gave him little employment and confined him to a very solitary mode of existence.

Soon after his arrival from England, the young officer was sent up the country to one of our outlying positions where in time of peace there is little or nothing to do but to see after the drill and equipment of a handful of soldiers. Here with no society in few books, he was driven much upon his own reflections. A less active mind would have deteriorated under such a discipline. General, then Lieutenant Mansfield, was only strengthened by it, and confirmed in his self-reliant habits of thought. The few books he had were of a grave and profound character.

I was obliged to think over them a great deal, I have heard him say, or they would not have lasted me long. Some of them were books brought with him for the study of the ancient language and literature of India, and these involved him in the subtle and metaphysical speculations, which distinguished certain sects of Brahmanism and the great Brahminical Reformation, if it may be so considered, which bears the name of Buddhism. The time spent in this species of retirement fostered habits of reflection, which the act of services of subsequent years never destroyed,

but only fed by the experience they brought of war and politics. One sees, therefore, that General Mansfield has had great advantage for a varied and complete culture, nor have the domestic affections been unknown to him. He lives now amongst us in his modest villa, the life of a bachelor. He is, in fact, a widower. He is, however, childless. Of wife and child, he was early bereft. He is of a gentle, generous and constant,

nature, and his few happy years of married life, have left so indelible an impression on his mind that I cannot pass them over without some mention. When Young Mansfield, as intimate friends then called him, whom we now speak of as the old general, first sailed from England, he carried with him a tender sentiment, the formal expression of which he thought himself bound to suppress, and many a time when in his solitary station the learned Sanskrit book lay open before him, his thoughts had wandered back into Somersetshire, and were with a certain Emily Cardon. He had no right to believe that the said Emily Cardin was still remembering him, but she also was of a constant nature. She had divined his love. She had more sanguine hopes of his future career than he himself

entertained. She had quietly laid up her heart as a treasure for him, should he ask it, until she knew that he never would or could ask it. No other disposition of it should ever be contemplated by her. When Mansfield paid his farewell visit to Emily and her parents, she took with him one sad and silent walk round a garden, almost silent, for ordinary topics of conversation, could not interest at that moment, and their own deep personal feelings, neither of them ventured to express. On leaving the garden, they shook hands together as simple friends shake hands, and while Emily's hand was in his, the young officer, hiding his emotion under the affectation of an antique and chivalrous courtesy, bent one knee on the plot of grass on which they were then

standing, and raised the hand which he was to part with, forever, to his lips. It was in appearance an act of playful homage, but for days afterwards Emily would let no one touch that hand, the hand which he had kissed. Nay, for years she felt his lips upon that spot. Often, I think, in secret, kissed that spot herself. But at the time no one knew why it was that when she sat musing alone with her elbow on the armchair. It was so often the back of her curved hand that her lip rested on, and no one guessed why it was, since the attitude was not ungraceful, though a little singular, why it was that she started with a faint blush when suddenly disturbed in it. Her thoughts, I believe, were always in India when she fell into that attitude. The very turf on which

they had stood together at that leave-taking was a sacred spot, how carefully it was moan. Once it was in great danger of being destroyed, the gardener and her father had both resolved upon its removal to carry out some projected improvements. But Emily had pleaded so energetically no one could tell why, for its preservation, that the little plot of grass was allowed to remain. How cold is Emily Cardin? Beautiful, but how cold? So ran the general estimation of her amongst female friends. She repels all advances. Does she mean then to waste the summer of her existence? Is it pride? Can no one be found worthy to please? Or is it really coldness and a loveless nature?

So we reason upon each other. Mansfield, on his side of the great ocean, that rolled between them, found the thought of Emily Carden mingling itself even with the abstractions of Hindu philosophy. Yet he mentally resigned her to some happier mortal than himself. No correspondence was kept, up between them. He heard of her, however, from common friends in England, and heard to his surprise

that she was still Emily Garden, to his surprise, and yet with some other feeling to which he gave no name, and which half contradicted the surprise. At length, the time came when he could claim leave of absence and pay England a visit. The first interview decided all. She was living in the same house in which he'd seen her last, there was the same garden to walk in, and there were the same feelings in both as if ten minutes and not ten years had elapsed. Something of the same silence, too, recurred as they walked round the garden together till Captain Mansfield, as he was then styled. Contrary to his usual habit became singularly egotistical,

talking much about life in India and about his own prospects, his own feelings and opinions, and ending in some proposition to which Emily at first gave no response. She led his steps to the small piece of greenest lawn on which they had both stood together when he last about her adieu. Did he remember it? He remembered well. He seized the given hand, this time with a solemn homage, his own henceforth, forever. She returned with him to India as his wife. A supreme happiness followed, but alas, how brief.

Hardly three years had passed when the wife and the child that had been born to him were sleeping in the earth. It was fortunate for the sufferer that, war having broken out, he could not indulge in long and fruitless sorrow. He had to dash away the tears that he might give the word of command and carry his regiment into action. From that time his promotion was rapid and his life full of stirring occupation. He retired from the service, wealthy and honoured. He has now lived some years in this quiet place, somewhat shattered in bodily health, but in the full maturity of his intellect. Am I not right in saying that such a man has lived a complete human life, such as was fitted to develop his mind on all sides?

I consider myself fortunate in being able to call him my friend. End of Section 2, read by Sandra. Section 3 of Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil by William Henry Smith Introduction Part 3

To me, who have passed my days almost exclusively amongst books, the companionship of such a man is invaluable. He gives me his experience. I see through his eyes the very realities of life. Even in matters of pure speculation, I find his straightforward judgment of great assistance. He's read fewer books than I, and partly for that very reason, judges with more clearness and decision.

I prefer often to quote his words because he decides where I should hesitate. But I beg to say that I never cite him on any occasion where I positively differ, unless that difference also is positively expressed. It is no conflict of opinions that I'm writing here. I call in his aid to complete or fortify my own conclusions, or at most to express an opinion where I should have none to offer. It is rather a harmony than a conflict of opinions that these pages represent. If the judgment of any one individual on so large a subject as the felicity of human life could avail anything,

there is no man's judgment, I would quote, with more alacrity than that of General Mansfield. He has seen so much and felt so much, yet kept his head so clear. A man of his experience is not likely to scatter golden opinions indiscriminately over the wide arena of human existence. He knows that there is pain and sorrow to endure, and that there are bad men to be resisted. He knows there is enough in the world to commiserate, enough to detest, but never from the general do I hear a note of misanthropy. Humanity is with him God's greatest work we know of, nor will he listen patiently to vague general lamentations on the misery of mankind. He's been so much impressed with the great and constant joy that lies in activity of every description, a joy

which from its constancy is often overlooked, that he's slow to consider anything as a misfortune which brings out the full energies of the man. We make moan often about events because they look terrible to the spectator. The actors themselves are absorbed in their own passions and their own efforts. We look at the man, not in. We look at the circumstances, not at the nature roused and moulded to meet them. You are standing, he will say, in your own pleasant drawing-room, well defended from the weather, and you listen to the storm raging without. The rain dashes violently against the film of glass,

which yet so securely protects you from its violence. Your thoughts fly to the sea, and you picture to yourself the misery of some hapless voyager who drenched to the skin is holding on by the rigging to save himself from being carried overboard by the rage of the tempest. You, warm and indolent, project yourself in imagination, into such a scene. But the man who's really there is no warm and indolent creature. He has all the energy the situation itself has called forth. You congratulate yourself on your easy chair,

you dry and comfortable room, congratulate yourself by all means and enjoy what the quiet hour brings you, but probably you yourself at some other time have been in the very position that seems so dreadful now. You have clung with all your might to the shrouds while the waves washed over you, while the winds seemed resolved to tear you from your hold and sweep you away into the ocean. But you clung, you strove gallantly. You drew breath when the wave had passed over you and prepared with clenched hands for the next encounter. You were there at your post. You had no thought of surrender.

You were all energy. The danger was swallowed up in the efforts you were making. Well, call up that hour, when drenched and buffeted by water and by wind, you offered stout resistance to the elements in every strong fiber of your body. Call it up fairly, fully, and place it beside this hour of fireside enjoyment and security, and tell me which of the two was the higher life? Which of the two are you most proud to have experienced? If we wish to form a correct estimate of human existence,

we must not dwell upon the loud bluster of the storm, and forget the thrill of power that responds to it in the hidden, noiseless nerve of the living man. This marvelous energy, he continued, seen in all animal life, but most conspicuously in man, calls forth my ceaseless admiration, and affords often a complete answer to men wailing over the destiny of others. So long as I see the man bear up and contend against the hostile circumstance, so long do I know that he is not forsaken by the genius of happiness. I have witnessed the horrors of war.

I have shared in the forced march. I have traversed the field of battle the day after. But still, I do not scruple to say that merely weighing out its pleasures and its pains, the excitements which attend on war itself add far more to the sum of human happiness than its worst calamities to the sum of human misery. My niece, who sits there in the corner so critically attentive to me, looks dissent. But I do not advocate war, my dear Ada, nor desire its continuance. The energies of man may find a better direction.

But it is still well, to see that whatever direction they take, they can scarcely fail to add to the sum of happiness. So much does our happiness lie in this energy itself. Take, if you prefer it, an illustration from the arts of peace. Follow the miner into the bowels of the earth. Watch the artisan, at his loom, packed close in the dark alleys of a town. The circumstances are to us distressing enough. But the man in whom these circumstances have developed the fitting and appropriate activity is not an unhappy creature. Before you pronounce a man miserable, be sure you have the real thing before you. Be sure that you're not pronouncing on some imaginary figure, made up

half of him and half of yourself, his circumstances and your temper and habits. I could not possibly complete my description of the general, and thus I introduced into the picture that Nis Adda, who was listening to him on this occasion and whom he partly addressed. The general was of that nature that cannot be satisfied unless it has something to love and to cherish, someone to pet and to admire. He found all this in Ada Newcomb. Her presence at Gravenhurst was the greatest inducement to him to settle down in this quiet neighborhood. She is the daughter of a sister of the generals who had married a Mr. Newcomb, a country gentleman possessing a small estate in these parts. Mr. Newcomb had died before the general's return from India.

Ada was living with her mother. I say the inducement was the society of his niece because although the brother and sister were on quite amicable terms, Mrs. Newcomb was one of those very useful, domestic, and often estimable women, who frankly and utterly renounce all book culture. The daughter was of a totally different type and could readily follow her uncle on almost all subjects

that he could desire to converse upon. Let me stop to observe that if there are moody reasoners who think it fit to express nothing but commiseration for the lives of men battered in the business and rascality of the world, even these will confess that there is something to admire and a theme for gratulation in some fair European girl or woman on whom has been showered wealth, beauty, and intelligence. When I see, for instance, a young English girl, full of grace and full of energy withal, dismount from her favorite horse which she does not quit without a fond and grateful patting of the neck, and follow her in imagination into her cheerful drawing-room, more or less elegantly furnished, supplied with books of a thoughtful character, which are

really read and perhaps with instruments of music that are skillfully played upon, I think I have before me one of the most highly finished, certainly one of the most significant products of our civilization. I suppose that a learned jurist or a profound divine would cite themselves, or cite each other as loftier examples of humanity, as higher types of European culture. I must be permitted to demur. I grant indeed that either of them may be a shade wiser than the English damsel of 19, and many shades more learned, but it is a newer wonder in the world that there should be many damsels of 19 intelligent and wise

than that there should be learned lawyers and deep divines. And when I think that the mental cultivation has not disturbed one natural grace, or one maidenly virtue, when I think of the blooming health and exquisite play of every limb and feature, the vivid emotions, the keen perception of the beautiful in nature, of the generous in character that distinguish my English girl, I must pronounce her altogether the far higher creation. Yes, a greater boast of the age than all its chancellors, and even all its bishops. Such charming English girl, you would have said, was Adanukum. There came, however, one day bitterness into her lot, which marred the picture I have to draw. I called to mind the first time I saw

Adanukum, which is now some years ago, but I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday. She passed me. I was on the way to her house, sitting upon her horse, a more light and graceful figure or a better rider I thought I'd never beheld. The slight figure sat balanced so perfectly and swayed so harmoniously with every movement of the high-spirited, yet gentle-hearted animal, that you looked on with unalloyed pleasure and without one moment's anxiety for her safety. If her fleet Arabian should give himself to the winds, you felt she would be as safe as if she were one of the winds herself. I see her rain up that proud Arabian.

I see her dismount at her own door. She caresses the beautiful creature who bends down his head to meet the caressing hand. I perceive his eye brightens as he feels that the eye of his mistress is on him. It rests on him with something of a tender gratitude, and there is some unspoken sadness mingling with her fond caress. She leaves the horse and proceeds to walk up the wide, old-fashioned staircase of the ancient family house she inhabits. But what is this?

What change has come over my beautiful picture? Can it be the same figure which I saw a moment ago, light and buoyant as the air, that I now see dragging itself slowly and painfully up those stairs, one hand, sometimes both, clinging to the banisters for aid? Ada is lame, the result, I believe, of some early accident, hopelessly lame. Well, might she love that horse? Seated on his back, she flew, no bird of the air more graceful, descended to the earth, one limping and disabled limb, Marsall. At each slow step the fair figure drops sideways.

is broken, sinks and rises as if each step were a fall and a recovery. The balance is recovered to be directly lost again. She advances up the stairs as children do, putting always the same foot foremost and bring in the other up to it. And when the stairs are accomplished, the level surface that remains to be traversed makes the plunging broken gate still more conspicuous, our Lily threatens to snap at every instant. But when seated again in her chair or standing quietly in the room, nothing is seen but a figure and attitude unimpeachably graceful, and a face of singular beauty. A stranger might even be in her presence some time without detecting this sad defect in her gate, for if only two or three steps were to be taken,

she would, by treading on a footstool or by some other expedient, contrived to disguise her lameness. This she would do in no vain hope of concealment, but from that love of the graceful which in her had been so cruelly balked. I have seen her exercise these little stratagems, where none but relatives or old friends were present. I have seen her make her way along the room, touching perhaps at the sofa or the centre table in her passage, by a series of movements which you might have thought capricious,

but which you never would have referred to an inequality in her limbs. Every other grace but that of one movement has been reserved to her, and the beauty of her face has lost nothing of its attraction. It presents a combination not frequently seen, deep blue eyes, a fair delicate complexion, and raven-black hair. In only one other person have I ever remarked that combination. Some of our bells at Gravenhurst think the complexion much too pale. The buxom Miss Rosemary is always wishing that she could give a touch of red to dear Edda's cheek.

Keep your roses, dear Miss Rosemary, for your own cheeks where they are very becoming. Keep or give them to the sighing swain that is kneeling for them, but let not even their reflection fall too strongly upon our perfect lily of Gravenhurst. A lover of books she would in any case have been, but it was the inevitable result of her lameness to make her attached to them in a remarkable degree. There was also one other result. She conceived the idea that it would condemn her to single life. Many girls commence their womanhood by saying,

I shall never, which may be only one sign that thoughts of marriage are stirring in the mind. Ada Newcomb said it in sad earnest and with a proud resignation. A little incident that occurred while she was yet in her teens aided her informing this resolution. There was a young gentleman who visited a great deal at her father's house. I knew nothing of him except that he was a handsome fellow and a general favorite with the ladies. This young gentleman was talking to a friend of his own age, and the friend was rallying him upon being in love with the pretty heiress.

What, with the lame girl? answered our youth with a laugh. Ada was passing at the time and heard the speech and heard the laugh that accompanied it. What, with the lame girl, rang in her ears. She repeated it again and again to herself as she crept along by the garden rails against which our youth had been leaning, cigar and mouth and mutually communicating their much smoke and their few ideas. What, with the lame girl? Yes, men might be very very much. polite, the more polite for her very lameness, and yet recoil from the idea of a lame wife.

One of the two evidently thought that the quality of heiress might act as compensation. Worse and worse, it was altogether a bitter lesson that had been administered to her. She was determined to keep her heart shut up, and as it were, hermetically sealed. The delight which the general experienced in meeting on his final return to England, this charming relative, and the affection and devotion he felt towards her. I should find it very difficult to express. Her deceased father could not have loved her more intensely, and with this quite parental feeling he mingled a tender homage to her beauty and misfortune.

It was the greatest delight to him to render her every service in his power. Nor do I think it could have been possible in all England to have found a companion so entirely suited to the general as his own niece soon proved to be, for her fresh inquiring and susceptible mind rekindled his own. Though piously disposed, the highest speculations of philosophy were open to her. Her piety was not of that order that checks the inquiry after truth and forbids to the reason its full and appropriate exercise.

Nor, on the other hand, had the uncertainties that attend upon philosophical speculations chilled her piety, though they had saddened her soul. She was prepared to listen or to discuss on almost every topic. that could interest a cultivated mind. One of the amusements of the general is the building of a villa, he says, for his own residence, but it requires very little penetration to perceive that it is for his niece he's planning in building. He consults her on every particular. A site has been chosen that commands an admirable view of the Welsh hills.

He pleases himself with the idea that his niece shall have one of the most perfect villa residences in England. They often sally forth together, and I have sometimes had the good fortune to accompany them, to inspect the progress of the building, he walking and she riding by his side, now upon a charming pony which he's persuaded her to substitute for her high-spirited horse. This he has done both because he can walk the better by her side, and because he is a little apprehensive of danger from her want of mere power to rein in the more spirited animal. Her strength has been declining of late. They proceed in this fashion to the very beautiful spot where

the walls of the villa are rising. He lifts. He lifts. her down gently from the pony, deposits her on what is to be the future lawn, draws forth his plans, his drawings, and consults her taste on all the arrangements, accessories and ornaments that he proposes. Then there is talk of the pictures and statues he means to introduce, and from the fine arts the conversation naturally wanders and widens till there's no possible topic that might not be embraced in it. Our great topic of good and evil was not likely to be omitted. The group would not be faithfully described unless I made specific mention of Vada's pony. She's as fond of it as she was of the Arab, and he returns her affection. He is as tractable and social as a dog. On dismounting,

she has no necessity to tie him up. Pony has no idea, however, intent upon his grazing, of losing sight of his mistress. He comes to her as a dog would come when he's called. She has used no art to obtain this docility. She is simply fond of her dumb friend, and her dumb friend. And her dumb friend end is fond of her, and pleased to render a service which she seems to have detected is more a service to her than it would be to another. The presence of the pony has led us sometimes to discuss the relationship between man and the lower animals. The brute creation in general are very deeply interested in the question of the progress of man. I do not think that their condition has been at any time deteriorated upon the whole by their subordination to one who may seem to

them a strange mixture of cruel taskmaster, of beast of prey, and of fatherly protector. If he has in one spot, and for one purpose cruelly misused them, he has on other occasions, and more generally protected, sheltered, and even cultivated in them, a certain amenity of disposition. But there is still much room for improvement, especially when we keep them for their labor, how much we owe them, how much did our ancestors owe to their ancestors? life itself, food, and cultivated plains. I know not that even now with all our command of the forces of physical nature, with all our steam engines and our chemistry,

we could hold ourselves on the face of the earth without them. I think the higher men grow, the more tenderly they will feel towards these simpler tenets of our common habitable globe. They have made it habitable to us. They are capable of affection. They can give us the greatest of all pleasure, that of giving pleasure, that of giving pleasure to other beings. These things we sometimes discussed.

Ada, resting on the authority of, I forget what celebrated writer, remarked, quote, that of all the arrangements of Providence, the subjection of so many noble animals to the tyrannical power of man was surely the most perplexing, end quote. To which I, or the general, would respond that the power was not always used tyrannically,

that as man progressed in knowledge and in character, he used his power beneficently, and that if man was to be raised to this noble and beneficent position towards the lower animals, he must necessarily have the power given him, though under the certainty that in his own ruder stage of culture, he would often abuse it. The relationship between man and the lower animals looked at along the history of both will not need any peculiar vindication of the ways of providence. These and kindred subjects we discussed, but I have said that my report of our conversations shall be postponed till I have delivered myself of my own brief

didactic exposition. End of Section 3, read by Sandra Gravenhurst, 2023. Section 4 of Gravenhurst, or thoughts on good and evil. This is a Lipervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitlippervox.org. Gravenhurst, or thoughts on good and evil, by William Henry Smith. Exposition Chapter 1. Pain and Painful Emotion

I must unavoidably commence with some trite and indisputable observations, but I will be as brief as possible. Pain and pleasure are the stimulants of that activity, which is the source of all our knowledge and all our arts, and which is itself the most universal. of pleasures. It is impossible for us to conceive of life being developed without both of these stimulants. Hunger, thirst, bodily uneasiness are constantly giving movement to the whole animal creation. Pain that acts as a stimulant to action blends with or is lost in the sense of effort

or the vigorous muscular exertion it calls forth. Very acute pain, paralyzes or subduees, but the prick and the sting that stimulate to energetic movement are forgotten in the energy they produce. In many of our motives, it is difficult to say, whether pain or pleasure predominates. Hunger having been once gratified, there is a prospect of pleasure, as well as the present pain in the desire for food. Generally, there is in desire, the anticipation of some pleasure, and also a direct pain from the absence of that pleasure. if now this important state of mind which we call desire be thus a plunding of pain and pleasure we see at once how indispensable a part pain performs in human existence pain also is the great conservator of life it gives note of danger the memory of pain is our great safeguard and protection if the fire did not hurt the child it would not withdraw its finger if the hurt were not remembered there would be no second salutary dread of the fire afterwards. So also the pain that arises from any abnormal condition of our own organism, draws our attention to the ailment, imposes rest, suggests remedial

actions, and teaches caution for the future. We should die very rapidly if we're not for the pain of disease. If a personal want initiates the activity of the individual, it is sympathy with each other which lies at the basis of human society, and sympathy is, in the first instance, chiefly called forth by pain or dread of some affliction. We sympathize with each other's joys no less than with each other's griefs, but even when we sympathize strongly with each other's joys, it is where there is some sense of escape from threatened or probable affliction. And generally speaking, this form of the sentiment is of later culture or development. Society in its earliest stages owes more to the sympathy which is called forth by pain, by wounds, by death, that sympathy which enlists the passions of 20 men and the suffering

and calamity of one is the rude initiator of criminal justice and moral reprobation. Could I point to any great fact, which shows more distinctly how pain and pleasure lie together at the very roots of human existence. They indeed are twisted together in every fiber, in every leaf, in every blossom and fruit of the great tree of life. It would be idle to pretend that disease is not an evil. It is, if you reckon amongst diseases,

all the distressing bodily results of age and poverty, the greatest and the most widely spread of all the evils that afflicts society. But if you regard society at large, you will find that these bodily distresses are eventually leading to combine social action for their relief. And if you regard the family group, you cannot fail to perceive that we are the sick, the aged, and infirm are cared for and preserved to life. There is a development of compassion, of tenderness, of fortitude, and of other states of mind which greatly enrich our human lives. not say that the presence of an invalid is always salutary to the temper of the other inmates of the house. We all know that it sometimes operates in a very undesirable manner, but speaking generally of human life, it tends to soften, to elevate, to teach self-denial. I look through the

village of Gravenhurst. I could point to more than one household where the tone of thought and feeling has been evidently raised by the presence of its invalid. One I could name where the husband is naturally rough and boisterous, and the wife somewhat sharp and shrewish. Given much, they say, to scandal. A favorite daughter has been long confined to a room by illness. There is at least one chamber in that house where the voice of anger is never heard, where the thoughts take it gentle, in times a lofty tongue. The wife drives her accurate, critical, and her accurate, criticism as she enters it, and spares even her next-door neighbor. And for the boisterous husband, I have known him walk a mile out of his way in the keen March wind to bring the first primrose,

or the first violet, to the imprisoned infallent. He knew where the earliest grew, and would have been not a little vexed if anyone who discovered his secret, and anticipated him in his trivial gift. A man mostly absorbed in money-making, and his calisely, and his calisement. He was a little bit of calculations of profit and loss, lends himself wholly to this slight but disinterested service, yet not altogether so slight, to her who could no longer seek them herself, where they grow on the green earth, and in the fresh air, and beneath the rolling clouds, what an intense, an exquisite pleasure this little gift would bring. He has told me himself that she wept with joy when she saw them,

that he is very near his own eyes when he told me this. and mark how contrast and limitation heighten our pleasure. To the pale prisoner, the scent and beauty of a thousand flowers were concentrated in a solitary primrose, pale almost as herself. Do prisoners of a certain stamp, a few simple joys, shut in with them in their cell, shall expand till they fill the whole capacity for enjoyment. From pain, we are easily led to the dread of pain, to the resentment that follows a upon pain, to anger, hatred, fear, and all the list of depressing and inflammatory passions. Dyer inmates to the human breast, which admits them too readily, or retains them too long. Yet what passion is, their witch, in its due degree, and place is not serviceable to happiness,

or is not a happiness itself. What we call bad passions owe their badness to a defective state of the intelligence, as when emulation becomes envy in narrow minds or love becomes jealousy. But fundamental passion is there of the human mind that you would eradicate, not revenge. You know that this is needful to self-preservation. You know that when it is felt sympathetically, it becomes a noble indignation, summoning defenders round the weak against the strong. But the passion you urge that prompted the injury.

which has to be revenged. This might be eradicated, and then all would be peace. What is that assailant? What the passion that commences the strife and gives the first blow? It may be any passion that has not learned its limits, and has to learn its limits by this very retaliation it provokes. It may be cupidity,

and cupidity in itself is but the desire for some good, or it may be the love of power. the desire of governing others and making them subject to our will and you will pause long before you eradicate this love of power here also there is a passion which has to learn its limits from the resistance it meets with amongst the various tempers of men, some prompt to govern and direct, and some to seek the guidance and government of others. The more you examine the constitution of society and the origin of its government, the less disposed will you be, to interfere with this natural difference in the temper and passions of men. Then again, consider how the rudest passions of her nature become in the progressive development of man, we find how they enter into new combinations, and perhaps would seem base in

itself, becomes an essential element of a noble sentiment. No passion at first sight appears more degrading than fear, yet fear, by some admixture of thought, becomes reverence, becomes moral responsibility, enters into the sentiment of duty. If the ill opinion of others had excited no fear in us, the control which society exercises by turns over each of its members could have had no existence. The moral opinion or force of society could have had no existence. So anger, which leads in the first instance to wild injustice, gives to the advanced bond that moral indignation without which there could be no strength of character. To these transmutations we may revert again, but neither here nor

elsewhere. Could I hope to exhaust the subject? No, is it needful? The reader will himself supply additional illustrations. End of Section 4. Section 5 of Gravenhurst. Our thoughts on good and evil. This is the Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. or thoughts on good and evil by William Henry Smith. Chapter 2. Too Much Evil What then we call evil? Pain of body and mind is an inseparable part of the great whole of human life.

If this solution is not altogether consolatory, one thing is clear that it excludes certain other imaginary solutions. We cannot say, as the old Persian theology is reputed to, have said that good and evil are the creation of two antagonistic spirits. Being parts of one scheme, if we introduce two or more creative spirits, we must at all events resume that they acted in harmony. A spirit of being, itself created by another, cannot, of course, be the original author of evil. There is no resistance to our will which may not, in some sense, be pronounced, to be an evil, and yet the very exercise of power implies the idea of resistance.

You could not even wield the stick within your hand, unless it presented a resistance to your hand. All moral or mental power is exhibited by conquering some resistance, some error, or some misplaced passion. Is this necessary presence of some element we call by the name of evil, inconsistent with the idea of progress? By no means. We diminish the amount and alter the nature of our evils. We exalt. We multiply what is good.

No, is there any fear that by our progress we should deprive our energies are their needful stimulant of dreaded evil? Four, say, some misery like that of poverty, or that form of disease which originates in foul air and bad food, should by wise cooperation be kept at bay. The enemy is still at our gates and will return upon us. If we remit our vigilance, we may have built our dikes, and won a smiling territory from the wasteful sea,

but unless we also keep our dikes in repair, the ocean will be on us again, and afflict far more misery than it could have done before we had our conquest. It is worth noticing that, as we advance in knowledge, and in arts, we act more and more on perspective or precautionary grounds, and less from the immediate stimulant of pain or want, and our impulses partake more largely of hope than a fear. Yes, yes, I think I hear my impatient reader exclaim. We admit all this.

Pain, the conservator of life, the stimulant to action, the exalter of pleasure by the contrast its supplies could not be dispensed with. We admit, too, that every heroism in the world would fall flat, unless supported by its antagonistic evil. And we clearly perceive that our highest thoughts and emotions are in part composed of grief and indignation, sorrow and disappointment. All the fine arts as well as the virtues, eloquence, poetry, and music, claim kindred to sorrow as well as to joy. We admit all this, but we say that there is too much of this element of evil. It seems to us that there is much bodily pain and much torture of mind that might so easily be spared. If there is no nerve, sometimes yielding pleasure and sometimes pain, we should venture to eradicate from our system,

we cannot but think that the conditions of life might be so modified as to call forth less frequently its faculty of suffering. If there is no passion, we could altogether erase without degrading the entire man. There is surely a disproportionate intensity of many of them, from which we might be relieved. There is too much evil. Passions are too violent, wants are too agonizing. Pains and distresses are too numerous, too persistent, too intense. The complaint is natural. Who of us has not made it the day of his sorrow or his indignation. But consider this, that it lies in the very nature of pain and suffering, that we do and must complain of it. Whatever the degree in which it presents itself, it must always seem too much.

It is always from the nature of the case, the element we wish away, that stands out against us as repugnant and superfluous. No animal, and certainly not man himself, could be trusted with the modification or reconstruction of his own life. He would at once and forever reject what is repugnant, and in so doing, unnerve his whole existence. Every animal that has to seek its food with bargain for a regular supply and kneel at hand, yet with those who have great powers of locomotion, the irregularity and uncertainty of supply is connected with the exercise of their peculiar faculties. What would become of all the birds of the air, with a glory of their outstretched and untiring pinions, if it were not for that seeming precariousness of supply, which doubtless they would themselves complain on, and which even

benevolent men have contemplated with some dismay and distress. We men, for our own parts, are in the habit of saying that it is well for us, that we cannot always predict the future, that there should be abundant play for hope and curiosity and surprise. nevertheless this uncertainty is a state which each one for himself will constantly remove if he could he must wish to read the future while he is still in the anxious present that there is a general feeling of too much evil is not therefore a proof that this element is in excess viewed as part of the whole because from its nature it is always that which is felt to be too much nevertheless this question of degree is one which may legitimately be raised if only one could grapple with it a common all-seeing spectator of human affairs might discuss such a question we stand ourselves in this predicament if our knowledge is not sufficient to enable us to pronounce that it is not in excess an opinion to which from the general harmony of nature one may be disposed to lean it is certainly not sufficient to pronounce that it is not so much to be in excess an opinion to which from the general harmony of nature one may be disposed to lean it is certainly not sufficient to entitle us to assert that it is in excess. How can man the sufferer trust himself

to form any decision upon the degree in which pain and pleasure should be diffused over the whole world? How can he know that passion's less violent, wants less painful, distress is less extensive, what have answered the purposes for which passion want and distress have been called in? He knows this, that it should always give his judgment in favor of the something less. I ask of no man to be contented with the amount of evil existing at any time, in any age or country. It is the nature of evil to prompt opposition to it. The more intelligence there is in man, the more vigorous and factual the opposition it will prompt. The greatest of all calamities is the contentment that sits down at peace,

with a remediable evil. But how can I measure the degree of that stimulant necessary to call forth those energies by which we progress? It would be very hard to grapple with this question of degree. Let me recall the effect produced by the political economists, with mouth this at their head, demonstrating the tendency of population to outstrip the means of subsistence, to keep this tendency in check,

has appeared to some reason is the great problem, or the great despair of sociology. But all men, and certainly all political economists, must admit that the tendency of population to press upon the means of subsistence has been, and still is,

a most essential stimulant to the labor and ingenuity of man. The tendency, you say, is too strong, who has proved that it is too strong? It is most desirable that a people have come to the age of reflection, and amongst whom industry no longer requires the immediate spur of want should be called upon to exercise prudence in the matter of marriage, and we see that its attention is called to this momentous subject, and a suitable modification of the moral opinion of society is taking place. But who shall say that the tendency by which population increases has been too strong for the purpose it has had to accomplish? By it, the earth has been peopled, has been cultivated, and the colonization of uninhabited regions still depends on this pressure of population upon subsistence. And we see that when men become calculating and prudent in other manners, they become prudent in this matter also.

We know that the pressure of population upon food is far less severe in thickly peopled in industry's countries than amongst the scanty populations of semi-parorous regions. On the whole, we may safely assert that this pressure becomes less and less painful, just as it becomes less and less the imperative motive of human industry. The same increasing intelligence which enriches and exalts human life will prevent its own work from, being destroyed by a two-great flood of population. The alarm has been sounded, not prematurely, because it must take many ages before all ranks of society can be reached by it, but quite in time, but the civilized nations of Europe have still large territory open to them,

delicious climates and fruitful soils, both to the east and to the west. No can it be known how far their own soil admits of improved culture, A thinly inhabited country may feel the pinch of hunger as severely as a more populous country. Say that in this early stage it had sought relief by limiting its population. It would forever have remained a thinly inhabited,

poor, and uncivilized country. Passions, you say, are too violent. Certainly in this or that man too violent, and that other, perhaps too feeble. No one is in all respect. a perfect character, and here we encounter another of nature's great beneficent laws or tendencies. Everywhere variety. Throughout all the animal creation, what endless variety.

One type is seen to be developing itself into every possible modification, and between man and man, between mind and mind, the same inexhaustible variety. Nothing is apt to strike us with more admiration than this diversity. of human character, coupled as it is with certain great similitudes, and if these quick resemblances between man and man, are absolutely necessary for the foundation of any society, or any code of morals, since if the same thing did not generally give pleasure and pain, there could be no general law for human conduct. It is equally true that differences between man and man give to all human societies, their vivacity, their movement, and the mental activity that distinguishes them. I half suspect that if a man was suddenly to be plunged into a society

where everyone was exactly like himself, he would go mad. The ennui would be intolerable, losing all sense of contrast. He would be in danger of losing his sense of individuality. His varied personality would grow dim to him. Be that as it may, this variety of character, a powers temperament's habits, is of infinite importance, and essential to the progress of humanity. And how could this variety exist, if in every individual the passions were mingled

in what we should pronounce perfect proportions? The existence of this diversity of human character is manifestly incompatible with the frequent attainment of an ideal standard of perfection. One man is strict in calling others to account, vindictive in his justice, earnest in punishing offenders. Too earnest, you say, too vindictive. But his amiable neighbor is too lenient, too compassionate, or else, out of very indolence, far too ready to forgive offenses by which he does not personally suffer. The vindictiveness of the one is boundless by the or indolence of the other.

Much better you say, that all should have the same temperate in unyielding sentiment of public justice, by which laws with the public welfare are sustained. But how expect the same energetic yet equitable sentiment in men of different tempers, who have been, moreover, subjected to the also beneficially varied circumstances of life? Sometimes the one character is plainly the complement of the other, as where one man is submissive, and claims guidance and protection, and another is of the dominating order, exercising control and skillful in organizing. Do considerations of this kind lead us to tolerate all character, a light good and bad, kind and cruel? Not at all. There are certain great subjects on which men think and feel sufficiently a light,

to form a strong moral opinion, which is constantly coercing individual peculiarities or eccentricities. Coupled with this diversity of character is a general acceptance of certain great truths, and a general desire to force these truths upon our neighbors. We conclude, therefore, that the too much of pain and painful emotion can only be asserted by one who, after surveying the whole of human life, could confidently, pronounce that a less degree of that which in any degree is odious, would have been equally compatible with all the advantages that are complicated

with pain and painful emotions. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Gravenhurst, or thoughts included in evil. This is a liverbox recording. All liver vogue's recordings are in the public. domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Gravenhurst or Thoughts Ungood and Evil by William Henry Smith. Chapter 3. Moral Evil

Perhaps the reader relinquishes this question of debris and limits his objection or his perplexity to one kind of evil. Moral evil, crime, sin. Pain and painful emotion. he can understand as having a fit place in God's creation. Do they not practice us in fortitude and other virtues? A pain given with vicious intention by one man to another, this must surely be attributed to some diabolic agency. How can the God who punish his sin have also ordained its existence? How reconcile our notions of the justice of God

with the belief that man in all respects the creature of God. This, with many minds, is the great difficulty that besets our subject. That which, amongst animals or idiots, is mere hurt and injury, becomes moral evil, becomes crime or sin, to intelligent man occupied with the interests of society or the presumed judgments of God. Evil, therefore, becomes moral evil. How? By the development of human reason. and a pleasure-giving act becomes moral goodness by the same development of intelligence.

We have not here to speak of any absolutely new passion, what has converted evil into moral evil is the elevation of other parts of our nature. The intentional acts of men become moral evil, because they are performed or contemplated by beings capable of moral judgments. Whether you pronounce these judgments to be a result of a special moral fact, faculty, or describe them as the reason judging for the welfare of the whole community. It is still sufficiently plain that evil becomes moral evil by the addition of these judgments. It is the result of this higher or peculiar development of the human mind, that to injure another,

under certain circumstances, becomes moral evil. We see this by simple statement the utter impossibility of ascribing simple pain or evil to the creator of the world, and moral evil to some other, and diabolic agent. The evil being there, the conversion of it into moral evil marked our advancement. You say that the passions, motives, energies of man ought to be uniformly controlled by reason or conscience. Why then, has a world been formed of which they are not always so-controlled? But unless there had been passions needing control, capable of leading to violent and mischievous actions, how could this moral restraint have been brought into existence?

It is because we have to check and regulate both ourselves and each other that there is such a thing as morality at all. No theorem in Euclid is more clear than this, that moral good and moral evil start into existence together. Reason and conscience are themselves developments from the experience of the good and evil of life. The moment reason and conscience are thus developed, good and evil have become moral good and moral evil. The creation of man is a moral being, involves the necessity of moral evil. Let us first suppose that all men acted spontaneously, whether from instinct or perfectly balanced passions, in that manner, which was best for the whole. Here it is plain there would be no room for the development of our moral sentiments.

A perfect code of morality might be acted, but not from the sentiments of moral responsibility, duty, merit. Rules of conduct would be as unnecessary to such a race as to the ant or the bee. There would be no conflict between the present passion or immediate interest of the individual, and the reason judging for the interest of the whole community. Conscience, describe it how you will, would be latent, undeveloped. Let us next suppose that there was such amount of irregularity and mischief in the spontaneous actions of men as to develop the conscience,

as to suggest the making of laws or rules, and affixing a penalty of some kind to their infraction. And let us suppose that the moment such rules were made, the moment that conscience was developed, and good and bad conduct became, therefore, right and wrong conduct, that all the bad conduct now stigmatized is wrong, vicious, immoral, immediately ceased. Here obedience to the rule is supposed at once to become universal, at once to reach its maximum in every individual.

But who sees not that, the supposition is utterly at variance with all the great facts of human nature, with the force of habit, with the gradual formation of definite and universally received laws, and if such a violent supposition could be gravely discussed, if the moment a moral judgment were formed, the evil on which you pronounced altogether ceased, I am at a loss to conceive how, in such a state of things, where all would be equally obedient to the moral law. there could be any feeling of merit, any glow of virtue, any praise given or received. Granting that such a uniformity of moral conduct is desirable, it is plainly impossible that it could be produced suddenly. What in the nature of things is founded on experience must be preceded by the requisite experience.

If a race of thinking beings is to act from a rule of reason or intelligence, that is, from a rule of reason or intelligence, that is, from, generalized experience. There must have been a process of thought or experiment carried on and carried on through several generations. Man injures himself and his fellow man by his ignorance and passion. For many ill results of these, he learns temperance, he learns equity. These virtues are, from their very nature, to be learned, from the experience of good and evil, and will be learned gradually. Turned the subject to how you will. Moral good could not exist unless its counterpart of moral evil also existed or had existed. This truth is self-evident, and yet it seems to be overlooked by those who repeatedly perplex themselves by

asking, how could God be the author of moral evil? The great fact that ought to arrest their attention is that God has been the author of a moral being. He has so arranged the circumstances of life, and the powers and propensities of man, that the reason or judgment cultivated in this scene of pain and pleasure, produces for us the sentiments of merit and duty. I repeat that no refuge can be taken at any peculiar ethical theory. Natural evil, says one reasoner, becomes moral evil, because it is at once felt to be such. Man has a moral perception, an original faculty of conscience, by means of which he perceiving. receives certain conduct to be right and wrong, just as by his ordinary organs of perception, he receives things to be blue or red, round, or square. In my apprehension, what is here called

an original faculty of conscience, is the judgment of our conduct according to the rules that have grown up as the reason and affections of man develop themselves. I have explained this elsewhere and may again find it necessary to go over. this beaten yet intricate ground of ethical discussion. But adopt, if you can understand it, this theory of an innate moral perception. It is still clear that this faculty could not have its proper exercise,

could not be developed, unless they were presented before it, both moral evil and moral good. That natural evil has become moral evil is the sign of bands' advancement and immense superiority above all of the living creatures. Beast injure and destroy each other, and we call this a natural evil.

It would be like natural evil in man, but that his higher reason condemns it. He compares such injury and destruction with peaceful and beneficent conduct. He approves the one, condemns the other. God, then, is the author of moral evil in what way? By its development of the reason of man. He has enabled him to compare conduct with conduct, result with result, enabled him to approve and

condemn. All this is very clear. But why then? It is asked, does God punish moral evil if he created it? There are two theories abroad on the nature of divine punishment. If the divine punishments were the judicial or consisting of penalties brought out by the operational laws already established have for the end, the guidance of men, and of societies of men, here or hereafter, then these divine punishments are what means to carry on the progressive development of the human species. The whole scheme is still in harmony in all its parts. There is no difficulty in God's both creating and punishing moral evil. He creates it by the additional intelligence he gives to man. That is, he has raised in the name,

in a desire to combat evil. He fosters or enlightens that desire by affixing penalties where man has declined this combat. If, according to another theory, God punishes sin simply because it is sin, simply from a supposed repugnance or hostility to moral evil,

without any regard to the results of punishment, then I admit that it is impossible to reconcile such notions of God's justice, with the fact that God is the creator of the world. But this last theory of divine punishments is not, I believe, the one generally received. Perhaps in the general mind there is some confused notion of retributive justice, which would be found difficult to reconcile with the faith equally general,

that God made all mankind and the whole of our humanity. But the theory that God from the necessity of his nature must punish sin as sin without regard to the beneficent result of the punishment itself is one which would be only formally set forth by a peculiar class of theologians. It matters not, however, whether that class of theologians be large or small. It is a theory utterly irreconcilable with the belief in one supreme, creative, and beneficent intelligence. In one sense of the word, God creates no evil. I said that I had no paradox to vote forward, yet the conclusion to which we are inevitably led can hardly be expressed in terms which do not sound paradoxical. There is no evil in the sum of things, no evil in the

relation which any one thing bears to the great whole, as it develops itself in space and time. The evil that man endures is evil at the time to him. He has to resist it, and by resistance to rise in the scale of virtue and intelligence, and that which is evil in the individual man, and which must everywhere be followed by its penal consequences, is yet not evil to an eye that could embrace the whole development of humanity. If pain and pleasure together make a happier, and far richer world than pleasure only, if passions regulated by individual reason, and by laws made by reasonable communities, for their common guidance, formed together a far higher world than would be produced by a set of uniform imperative intuitions

or by harmonious appetites and passions that needed no control. And surely, we are justified in asserting that the presence of what we inevitably call evil or moral evil is not inconsistent with the proposition that the whole is good. God, the creator of the whole, has created only for the good of the whole, has created only for the good of the whole. universal laws and powers the whole of nature or that supreme reason by which alone we can represent to ourselves the unity of nature this declares itself on the side of happiness and on the side of goodness as both the highest happiness and the permanent guardian of happiness since in the entire scheme of creation evil is subordinate to good and humanity is the greater

and rises to higher and higher development owing to this admixture of good and evil. It follows that we cannot say of the author in the entire scheme that he is created for any other purpose than good. Nothing is evil in relation to the whole, and this becomes more impressed upon us when we regard humanity in its progressive character and see how one generation is developed from another. How inevitably necessary, the experience

of many ages is to the wisdom of mankind, how the fierce pleasures and fantastic errors of one period are but the conditions of the calm of joys and more rational beliefs of a subsequent period. We live under this supreme reason, not under a being beneficent in the manner of a sympathetic man, who weeps at every calamity, rushes ever to the rescue, and burns at every injury. We live under a supreme intelligence, who has created in us by the very spur of want, an intelligential power that combats with want. The presence of both good and evil is the condition of our intelligence, and again, this aroused intelligence has for its office to multiply and exalt the good, and as much as possible to subdue the evil. All the several parts of our creation form one scheme, and that scheme is beneficent. I am entitled to say this, although I am not entitled to say that other schemes of which I know nothing

may not result in greater happiness and higher intelligence. If I had seen but one animal, I should be justified in admiring the harmony of its organization, and the vivacity and pleasure of its movements, although I certainly should not have been a entitled to say that an animal of still greater power or beauty or vivacity could not have been created. All who battle for the good are in the language of a natural piety, the children of God. They arranged on the side of goodness or the production of happiness, and they also receive into their hearts as their indisputable reward, the highest sentiments of happiness. If evil in some form of degree is eternally with us, this or that evil is not always necessary.

Often it invites us to remedy or remove it by individual or combined efforts. Already some great evils that have afflicted society belong with us to the past, others are prompting us forward by intimations that they also are vulnerable to attack. Yes, and there are irremediable evils, death and doubt, limitation to existence, limitation to knowledge, such evils, I think, as have this character being irremediably stamped upon them, are those also whose permanent place in human life seems distinctly justified by the nature of the whole. something we must add on both classes, the remedial and the irremediable. Something we must also say of evil, as it is modified in our view by a belief in progress,

and then we close this brief exposition. End of Section 6. Section 7 of Gravenhurst. Or thoughts on good and evil. This is a liverbox recording. All liverbox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Liparvox.org. Gravenhurst or Thoughts on Good and Evil by William Henry Smith.

Chapter 4 Remedial Evils or Man Progressive Observe. It had not much consoled the race of Master John's to know before they went to fossil that anon, their place would quicken with the elephant. They were not elephants, but mammals. Mastodons, and I, a man as men are now, and not as men may be hereafter. Feel with men in the agonizing present. So sings and wisely the authoress of Aurora Lee. The pleasures of the coming elephant could not reconcile the Mastodon to any trials he had to endure.

I certainly could not attempt to console the present generation, if it needed to be consoled, by pointing to the superior happiness, which will probably be attained by some subsequent generation, to bid one portion of the race to lie down patiently, as it were, in the breach, that another portion may pass over it into the citadel, might not be thought very kindly or acceptable advice. The idea of progress is a vast addition to the present life of all thinking men, to know that each age works not only for itself but for its successor, aggrandizes our conception of the whole of humanity. But each age has in itself its own completeness, its own harmonies, its own content.

If it were not so, if the nature of life were to be miserable hitherto, I know not by what line of argument we should ever have established our idea of progress. Progress is not directly from bad to good, but from some good to a greater, from knowledge to knowledge, from effort to effort. Neither the idea of progress nor the doctrine of immortality, however much they add to the grandeur of our present lives, by the emotions they occasion, or by the sublime views of human nature they justify, can be legitimately introduced as consolations for the miseries of the world at large. I know it is common to offer his consolation for the sufferings of this life, the happiness of another, but the same religious faiths which offers this consolation immediately afterwards limits it to the sufferings of the virtuous and the pious, or even to such of their sufferings, as were due to their virtue or piety. Need I say how inadequate a consolation this is to the miseries of all the various classes of mankind? Men, it is true, may be contented with their lives upon the whole,

and yet like to receive consolation for some unhappy portion of them. And to pious men, this doctrine of a future life, may offer the consolations they require. But, looking over the world at large, it is manifest that the greatest amount of misery is felt by those who, it is understood, are not entitled to the compensation of a happy futurity. Their greatest misery is that neither virtue nor piety have been cultivated within them. But to return to the idea of terrestrial progress, men extended their interest over the future of a human society,

even before our modern belief in progress had been developed. A Roman built for posterity, though we hoped for nothing higher than the continuance and stability of the Roman Commonwealth, standing where we now do in the annals of time, we look back upon the past with a conviction that each age, while laboring and enjoying for itself, has been laying the foundation for higher labor and enjoyment, and some future age. At least this has been always true of some nation, and what is done by one people is done for all the earth. Now, if anyone should here ask, why could not the last stage of human perfection have been at once attained? The answer is at hand. We have to repeat that human knowledge or wisdom is, from its very nature, built on that human experience which intervenes between the first and the last. You may perhaps conceive of some other kind of excellence, but this human excellence is from its nature, the result of experience.

the results of experience. How then could it be without that experience? If our spontaneity had from the first left us nothing to desire, we should never have been reflective beings at all. We should never have reflected, I mean, upon our whole lives, whatever we might have done upon inanimate nature. Reflection comes in with comparison, with preference, with approval and disapproval.

It is, in fact, another term, a comparison of a complex character. It is also plain that the reflection which a society makes upon its social or political organization must need the various experiences of several ages. I state this to show that it is a necessity of the case, that one age should be subservient to another. It does not follow that either age is incomplete in itself. The progress may be from harmony to harmony, from one organization to another organization. Our latest social and political institutions might have been adopted at once, as the earliest may have been, by spontaneous impulses, with very little reflection. But in that case, they could not have been what they now are, the products of experience, and the constant subjects for the exercise of reason.

Suppose we were all agreed that a representative form of government was the very best for human societies. How could such form of government be adopted by us, as reasonable creatures aware of its advantages, if men had not lived under other forms also, and if we were not capable of drawing a comparison between those other forms and this? We might you say have at once instituted such a government, guided by instance, instinctive impulse, and if so, we should have lived under it as ants and bees under their form of polity, whatever that may be. Progress is brought about by the energy of man, which energy is also his highest felicity, the age which in any way has fought and conquered for its successor

would perhaps be considered the more fortunate of the two if its successor had not also its own strife, strife at least to retain what had been thus acquired for it. The times of great wars and religious persecutions are not pre-eminently unhappy. In the first place, there were thousands whom the war or persecution never reached, who laboured, loved and married, and saw their children grow up in play about their knees. And in the next place, those who were engaged in the war or persecution had their own fierce delights of and suffering and defying the power that would crush them. I pity no one whose spirit is still unsubdued, who still combats and resists and strives.

I have said something elsewhere of the evolution and development of human society and of human knowledge. I have endeavored to show how it is that we necessarily proceed through the mere dictates of passion and force to forms of society that are based on reflection, and through imaginative errors to truths that were a scientific form. Slavery, war, despotism, religious persecution, are evils which we have already partly outlived. Evils we, from our position rightly pronounced them to be, yet each of them had its adaptation to the epigone which was found to exist, and each had a function to perform preparatory to a subsequent and happier era.

They still exist. They still have the like adaptation. One illustration must here suffice. War is already, and has long been, proclaimed to be an evil of the first magnitude, and forward-looking men anticipate a time when the disputes of nation will be decided by a society of nations, represented in some council of Congress. Meanwhile, we are as a people, still in that condition when we enjoyed the fierce delights of war. Nay, we read lectures to each other and the moral benefits arising out of the bold profession of arms. And, at all events, there is a general persuasion that this greater frame of states, this founder of nationalities, has not yet done its work. Wars of conquest and of self-defense have hitherto assisted at the formation, of every well-knit community.

The opposition from without has made the elements cohere within. Or perhaps, religious persecution may afford us a better and more instructive illustration. Here, our condemnation is still more decisive, and the evil, and its virulence,

is regarded by us in England as belonging to the past. Yet the actions of the state of the civil power in upholding among increasing multitudes, a faith generally beneficial to those multitudes is still recognized as a valuable element in our European societies. That action has changed its character and become more humane, and takes this off in the form of bribery as of persecution. In a rude age, which at once on all subjects appealed to force, it inevitably assumed a rude and violent character. Men were put to

death for not believing or not professing that national creed which had been made the basis of national education if such a national creed not founded on scientific knowledge not capable in itself of fixing the belief of multitudes has been upheld in this it's useful educational function by the power of the state we must not altogether quarrel with religious persecution at the same time the more thinking part of a nation will doubt grow of such creeds. The martyr and the rebel inevitably appear upon the stage. The new conceptions are gradually formed of the part which the state ought to take upon itself in this matter of religious belief. Each epic thus brings about the state action that is fitted for it. Very terrible scenes may be and have been enacted in the transition,

men are divided by the diarist animosities. Each party appears to the other in the blackest of colors, and yet each party is sustained by the very highest emotions of conscience and religious faith. There is a toleration for the persecutor we have yet to learn. I was lately reading the history of Philip II and the Grand Revolt of the Netherlands. What indignation I felt against the Spanish diagint, and indeed we Protestants must hate this despot. And yet, I asked myself, is it reasonable to lay upon one man as his crime, the fanaticism of a whole people,

and the tradition of ages? A great idea prevailed. It predominated entirely in Spain. It had prevailed generally over European society. It was the idea of a universal church, out of which salvation for the souls of men was important. possible. Kings as well as priests, and mobs as well as kings, were possessed with this idea. Scholars, soldiers, magistrates, all held themselves charged to maintain it, to write, to fight,

and adjudicate for its support. The error of all is the reproach of none. This Philip II is pre-eminently the great and pious king of pious Catholics, possessed of highest power, on him devourge. the severest task. The sword is in his hand and he must strike. This morose and superstitious king is, before all others, a slave to our great idea. But in one part of his dominions, this great idea is disputed and dethroned. I see the enlightened and wealthy cities of Holland, suffering every calamity that war and famine can inflict, rather than deny the new truth that has sprung up in them. They will not surrender their convictions. Rather let the sea take back their land.

Rather let the fires of martyrdom consume their bodies. Return stroke for stroke, you brave Dutchman. Bear all, inflict all, rather than surrender. Would that you could bind this monarch and fling him over your dykes, and be free to worship how you will. But now, when the fight is over in the combatants numbered with the dead, on whom are we to pass judgment, not on the solid king,

not on the solid citizen. They are gone from, before our judgment seat with all their antagonistic energies and repugnant duties. They have left only for our contemplation, a contest between two great ideas. All that remains for us is to congratulate ourselves on the new views that have become prevalent

as to the duty of the state in the matter of religion. But here we perceive our agent, may justly congratulate itself, and yet not condemn or effect to pity its predecessor. An enlightened people, a people whose minds are generally active, will put forth a variety of beliefs. And this very activity of mind becomes a substitute for that state authority which it resists. Among such a people, the action of the state is necessarily and wisely limited. Did such mental activity become still more general? The action of the state might be altogether withdrawn. All this is subject for sincere congratulations.

But if I am to look back candidly into some past era, I must see there also a certain harmony in the condition of things, a certain social organization, which is not unworthy of admiration, and ignorant, unreasoning people are bound together. and have their minds guided and enriched by some state-protected faith, which, be a composition, what it may, has in it the highest practical wisdom that the thinking few of mankind have hitherto attained. This also is not unworthy of an approving recognition.

End of Section 7. Section 8 of Gravenhurst, what thoughts are good and evil. This is a liver-box recording. All Livervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit livervox.org. Gravenhurst or Thoughts on Good and Evil by William and Reese Smith. Chapter 5. The Irremediable

It is springtime with us here at Gravenhurst and indeed of all Europe. Trees are budding, birds are singing. There is the green and golden verdure on the woods. and over all how soft a sky before me are two lambs couching on the grass and two little children standing together looking at them wonderingly and thinking i have suspect that the two lambs are far more wonderful creatures than themselves No, it is not always spring at Gravenhurst or elsewhere. It is not always youth with man or beast. We have our winter, an old age, and death the inevitable. But therefore it is that we can have spring in childhood,

and the sweet relation between the old inhabitants of the earth and the new born, the newcomer who is to be taught, protected, cherished, loved. Would you wish it otherwise? No leaf to whither and to fall. and no bud to come forth upon the branches, and no human bud. The same dry tree forever, the same internal man, neither young nor old, no glad anticipations and no cherished memories, both lost in the actual and eternal repetition of a monotonous existence.

I think in our madness we should wish the sun to fall out of heaven. A few months ago, I watched the last sea of leaves trembling on the boughs, or heard them fall one by one through the bare branches. Now I see the same elms and oaks, starring the blue air with their golden buds. The willer throws out a light chain of tender verger. Light chain of verger that cannot fetter the youngest wind that is reveling in this bright main warning.

But it fetters me, and it rest my step, my gaze. I should stay under it, a willing captive, but that my beautiful twin poplars must, be visited. They are waking from their wintry dream, and I observe that they begin the summer with the same bright, flame-like tint, with which they died down in autumn. Leaf by leaf, they drop their glory. Leaf by leaf, they resume it. And with the leaf comes the bird, hastening, with many a love song to build his nest. At first I hear a few brief low notes that are flung from bow to bow. They remind me of children's

kisses, blown to each other through the air. Then comes the whole tumult of melody and joy. Need I remind you that this perpetual renewal of spring, of youth, of love, of child and mother, as dark death for its necessary condition, the inevitable is also the indispensable. How much of life should we lose if we lived perpetually? How stagnant would have been the condition of man? supposing that habit had the same power that it has now, and without the power of habit, we could not construct a human life at all. I cannot understand how a race of immortal men could have made much progress in knowledge or in the arts. A tolerable existence once secured, habit, customs, rooted beliefs, operating like on all, would render change impossible. Curiosity and the love of novelty would die out.

Life would become a fixed routine. I cannot conceive that this middle-aged immortal would ever keenly anticipate the future. Perhaps wonder itself would fade away from the face of things, and that eternity beyond life, which death forever points to, though he points to it so silently, would of course, cease to be the great stimulant of man's sublimous thoughts and emotions. Nothing could be so fatal to human happiness as a terrestrial immortality. Indeed, it is hardly possible to form a distinct conception of so unnatural a condition.

The family, with all its ties and interests and affections, would of course be extinct. What sentiments man might still retain towards his fellow man, or the great external nature that surrounds him, would have lost their strength, their tenderness, their mystery. A touch upon that brain, and farewell king, farewell poet. The greatest of human beings is at the mercy of the blind, unconscious forces of the world. Annie Adam kills a man, but look again. Turned from the west to the east in the same king and yet another.

The same poet, and yet another, is treading the scene. Death was a mere mockery. Nothing kills the man. The blind unconscious atoms have for their mission His incessant reproduction. Yet the fear of death lies on each individual creature, and on man especially, and ever as life increases in value,

must death become more detestable. And ever as life increases in value, as it becomes richer and richer in love and knowledge, does the thought of death play a greater and greater part in all that is noble, or heroic in speculation or in action. There is a fear of death, the dark side of a theology zealous

for the promotion of human goodness and piety, cruelly zealous for the good, which I will not hear touch upon. No justice could be done to the subject, unless the whole influence of that theology viewed on its bright as well as its dark side, could be surveyed. But there is a natural fear of death,

which attends upon the love of life itself, and which must be considered as a permanent element of human existence. There must come a time when we shall cease to live, and what is a still more painful thought? Our dearest friends and those we love the most may depart before us. Natural sentiments of this kind must remain forever with us. Are the two causes of distress. The loss of our friends or relations gives far greater pain than the understanding. anticipation of our own to cease. This last is a mournful sentiment that occasionally throws its shadow over the stream of life.

But the unarrested stream flows on, and the shadow comes and goes, and seems to brighten the stream by the contrast that it brings. In health and vigor, we think only of our purposes, and fill the future as the present, with our pleasures and affections, and when, in the hours of our sadness, we dwell on the parting that must one day take place. Even then it is the something prized and lovable that the mind is resting on, and the sentiment of antedated regret is half a pleasure. Poets in all ages have been accustomed to enhance the charms of dear and familiar scenes,

by the pensive sentiment that we shall not always enjoy them, that the tree in the river will rustle and will flow for other ears and other eyes than our, No more by thee, my step shall be forever and forever. Doubtless, there are many evils besides death that would be reckoned amongst the irremediable. As some forms of disease, accidents, and injuries, received from the mistakes as well as passions of other men, such evils it will be said may diminish, not extirpated. Death is the holy irremediable, and I point to it to show that this holy irremedible, remediable is also the entirely indispensable.

There is one other evil which, even in this brief summary, I cannot leave unnoticed. No complaint has been more frequently reiterated than that against the ignorance of man or the limitation of his knowledge. As all our progress resolves itself into some extension of knowledge, our ignorance should obviously be placed in the category of remediation, evils. But then it happens that there is a certain kind of knowledge to which we aspire more ardently than to other, and it is precisely in this department of knowledge that the limitations have appeared to man to be fixed,

impassable. Some describe themselves as beating forever against the bars of their prison house. Here is another instance it is said of the wholly irremediable. It is no legitimate subject. to complain that every accession of scientific knowledge brings with it some new want of knowledge, some new stimulant for further inquiry. It would be a great misfortune if it did not. As the whole circle of our knowledge extends, those whose eye is on the horizon must see the dark line of our ignorance extend also. This is not the complaint that you hear often from our philosophers. The lament that has been made in every age, and in no age more frequently than in our own, is that there are certain great truths over which we are impelled to seek, and which yet forever evade our grasp, that on

certain subjects where observation and experience cease to be our guides as the origin of the world or the nature of God, the human mind inevitably thinks, and as inevitably thinks to little purpose. There is an impassable barrier which, nevertheless, we are constantly striving to pass. Is there indeed an ignorance of this description? Is there any subject on which men are impelled to think, yet on which we can pronounce that thought is, and always will be, unavailing? When one man is peering out into hopeless darkness, another tells you that he sees a glorious truth? Is the first autose, or is the second imaginative? The question is not easy to decide. I, myself, if interrogated on the nature of God, should not say that all examination of this

problem was hopeless. I should venture to reply, that as the world shapes itself in the intelligence of man, that human intelligence becomes a type, vague and imperfect, of one phase of that supreme reason, which is conscious of the universe it creates. Other men would be able, I doubt not, to give a still more lucid answer. But let us suppose that no man could give an answer that would satisfy many minds, or satisfy his own for very long together. Let us suppose that there is such an ignorance as we have been speaking up, an ignorance that is always felt, and which can never be removed. Still, I cannot consent to regard the sea-slip effort to overpass the boundary as itself and evil. Better this than an unconsciousness of our ignorance. I am not bound to admit,

I am not entitled to assert that what are sometimes called the higher problems of philosophy, as questions of ontology or the absolute cause of awe are and must forever remain in solace. But if this were the case, our attempts to solve them cannot be regretted. They are connected with our highest intellectual energies and intellectual emotions. The constant attempt we are said to make to attain the unattainable is a condition of things which implies that the mind is constantly imagined some solution, that it has an alternation of faith and doubt. The state of the case is put by the most desponding,

fingers is this, that, while on these great subjects, truth is not to be discovered, some men, or perhaps most men, at some period of their lives, believe they have discovered it. It is necessary to assume this, because if all men came to the same conclusion, that search was unavailing, that the discrepancy between our wishes and our powers, which is here made the subject of lamentation, would cease, and men would live contented with their ignorance. Attempts to think the unthinkable are not incessantly made, but on the assumption that some men believe that they succeed where others perceive failure to be inevitable. A mixture of doubt and faith in the same society is therefore the final condition of things

in which we are landed by those who take the most melancholy view of human knowledge. This mixture of doubt and faith is at least, favorable to intellectual energy in our highest life. The man who stands before nature and earnestly interrogates her in his own soul as to what they can report of God, as in the most solemn attitude of mind, but not necessarily a painful one. Let the response be uncertain. He still would not relinquish that attitude of mind under any bribe or third. could offer. He would not relinquish it, unless he would

prefer to be a beast rather than a man. He is man preeminently, when he stands in that attitude, but a theme of this kind would lead too far. I will here bring to a close this didactic exposition, and indulge

myself in my readers in repeating some conversations of my friends, which may less disagreeably tax their attention. End of Section 8. Section 9 of Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil. This is the Livervox recording.

All Livervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Livervox.org. Gravenhurst, or Thoughts of Good and Evil, by William Henry Smith. Conversation 1. Inequality of Happiness General Mansfield, Ada, Sanford We three, General Mansfield, Ada, and myself, whom I here call, by the name of Sanford, were at the new via which the general is building,

and which, as the walls are now completed, already takes its place very picturesquely in the landscape. We sat on stumps of trees or blocks of timber, that were still left upon what will be when all is finished, the smoothest of lawns, but which was then long and ranked grass. Workmen were busy around us. Plans folded and unfolded lay upon the ground by our side, but we had ended our consultation of them for the day. Ada had been fixing her eye upon the dull, shambling boy who was there to assist the workmen.

The boy's great eyes, let the light fall upon them from what object it might, and always the same passive stare, expressed nothing, seemed for their part, to be always gazing, vacant into vacancy. How difficult it is, she said, suddenly breaking our silence, to enter into the minds of men and women whose condition is very different from our own. I feel a certain amazement in awe when I think with strangers we are to each other. I know next to nothing of yonder boy, and he, as little little. of me. I might as well be in the presence of one of the dumb animals. I have, indeed, the same puzzled, painful feeling as when I look into the face of my dog, or my pony, trying to spell out their thoughts. Well, I hope they're all happy according to their several capacities,

and where the capacity for happiness is little, the capacity for misery is equally limited. Yonder boy, I think, will never know the heartache. What say, you uncle, did the remarks so often made that balancing both our pains and pleasures, the lot of all men, is nearly equal. Much joy, much anguish, little pleasure, little pain. Mansfield I see a vague feeling of equity in this desire to find the lots of all men equal.

Nature has an equity of her own, which does not seem to be precisely of this description. She fits each creature for the party has to play, but I do not see that she pledges herself, through all her living creatures, to keep the same proportions of sweet and bitter, to compensate always so much pain with so much pleasure, or to weigh out so much pleasure against so much pain.

I will venture to make one observation, a keen susceptibility, apart from other qualities, may expose a man to as much misery as happiness. But if to keen susceptibility is added an energetic active temper, such a man will, under all ordinary circumstances, enjoy far more than he suffers, because an energetic temper seeks out for happiness and throws off his disappointments and chagrins.

Such a man enjoys largely, while the sting of any calamity is soon lost in some earnest fresh endeavor. A poor, thin, weak, passive nature has no strength to conquer a new happiness and sits down in hopeless captivity to the present affliction. It is some compliment to human life

to say that the more complete a man's character, the fuller its development on all sides, the will, the intellect, the affections, the more certainly will the proportion be in his favor of happiness over missed. tis life, more life and fuller that we want. Sanford, we know only one man's life very intimately, our own, and we forget a great deal of that. It is difficult, therefore, to compare the entire lives of two different men,

because we can so rarely determine in what proportions, there several elements of happiness have really mingled in them. But there is no difficulty in estimating certain elements of human, in happiness and referring them to others. Of true modes of enjoyment, I may confidently say that one transcends the other immeasurably. I may assert this because my own experience is confirmed by the general testimony of mankind. Thus I could say without hesitation that the happiness due to our amiable affections is greater than the fierce pleasure of hatred or revenge. Everyone who has felt the two agrees in this estimate.

I can say that the satisfaction of acting according to my own reason, and with the approbation of my fellow men, gives a higher and more permanent felicity than the gratification of any one passion could do. I can say that steady, habitual, persevering occupation is the source of more pleasure than what we call amusements. Such estimates, being generally as, assented to lie at the groundwork of our moral opinion.

Ada. And if we can do thus much, we can also say with confidence of two men that one is happier than the other, since in the one the higher elements are more developed than in the other. Mansfield. Certainly in many cases, in cases quite numerous enough to disprove this theory of an essential equality in human lives. Nevertheless, as Sanford suggests, there would be a difficulty in many other cases of comparing two lives, from our ignorance of the proportion in which the higher and low elements were really developed in each. Besides, if we are curious in this matter, we might be called upon to compare one higher gratification with many of a lower description. We should have sometimes to puzzle ourselves by balancing quality

against quantity. I have seen an Indian prince in his palace, served by slaves and purity is all anxious to procure him, any new pleasure that he or they could devise, and I have known him child enough to be thoroughly

amused with his pampered, ostentatious, and quite sensuous mode of existence. I have left his palace, and met the poor Brahman, whose poverty was inover by his voluntary acceptance of it. feed upon a little rice, to drink only water, to have nothing but one's bent arm to rest

the head upon. Such in his own language was his choice. Can I measure the pride and tranquillity of the sacred and somewhat monotonous pauper with the other kind of bride, and the numerous pleasures of the silly and inflated prince? Ada, the Brahman, the Brahman, the sacred and monotonous pauper for me. Mansfield. Or, taking our present example, how could I compare the stolidity of yonder lumbering boy with the flimped pleasures and absurd fixations of some fine lady, who would look at him with affected amazement through her eyeglass? One thing I know, that that lumbering fellow has no more wish to be the fine lady than the fine lady to be transformed into the sturdy, be patched, bewildered, lout. She is not aware of it, but he grins at her in return for that fastidious glance through

the eyeglass. The snail and the butterfly are both content. They neither could, no would, be anything else, than snail or butterfly. In a word, a variety is the role, if not the necessity, but more could any living creature claim than this contentment with his own existence. This is nature's equity, not any universally sustained proportion of the good and the ill. Ada, men are not always nor often, contented with their lot, but I know what you mean. They are always contented with themselves. They cannot wish to be another man, they may wish to add to their own possessions another's wealth or another's knowledge. They rest in their own individuality. Yes, and this individuality is.

is in the main, so connected with the circumstances in which and by which it has grown up, that it carries with it a general feeling of contentment with the external lot also. It is a curious thing to reflect upon, this individuality or personality. This I myself must, of course, in the first place, consist of my own soul and body, one of both of which have some distinctive power of temper. But still, this self of mine, as I know it, is the result of these powers and temperaments acting and acted on through a long train of circumstances. I am what my past life has made me. I am the memories and the thoughts that have grown up here engraven earths and which could have grown up nowhere else.

Being the product of my past life, I am prepared to live the present, so that if a man has not been run to, suddenly from one station to another. If the current of his life has not been violently broken, the past has always fitted him for the present. I find great comfort in this wide generalization. I am

my past life, and am therefore fitted for what lies before me. Thank God, says some good man to me, that you were not born a savage. You might have been born a Fiji, or Fijian, and been married to a man who,

when he was tired of your society, would it make you and eaten you? I hope I do thank God for my existence, but I could not have benefited you or anything of the sort. It may have been one savage the more, and one English woman the less. But that additional savage, I hope she would have been contented with her lot, would not have been me. I and my own life are inseparable. Sanford, I too find great comfort in your own comfort in your own. wide generalization. Every living thing is born and grows by the operation of the same laws of forces, amongst which it passes its existence. Hence the general harmony. The consciousness of the

individual man is developed by the society in which the man has to live. Some original tendency or power is from the first secretly at work in each of us. It works by making us open to one class of impressions rather than to another. A soldier or priest, or rudus wordman, each one grows up in an external world which forms him to itself. One is glad to think that even classes of men, one cannot much admire, enjoy the results of this harmony between themselves and the atmosphere they have to breathe. That tricky huckster, whom I now catch a glimpse of, on the road below us, driving his miserable beast, driving everywhere his dirty bargains, as Cravenhurst knows to its cost. It's not an agreeable

creature to contemplate, but he has his own triumphs and rejoices in his own acquisitions. I cannot grudge them to him, though they are not the triumphs or acquisitions at the man of science, for instance, will sympathize with. But this molding of the individual by the society is, fortunately, not complete. After a time, this character, which is so much the formation of circumstances stands firm, and we say the man overrules the circumstance. Besides which, there are some few men whose inherent powers cultivated by the contemporaneous society

carry them in this or that direction, higher, farther than the contemporary society that surrounds them. They are bullion and creative natures. Give us the great leader, the great reformer, the man of genius. These natures return the dead they alter society by helping in the further formation of society. I know not how it is with other men,

but the greater number of truths I attempt to grasp that relate to human nature, the more am I impressed with the harmony pervading this great arena of human life. One man finds that character is too fluent, another that it is too rigid, its liability to change and its persistency in the form it has taken are both facts and most harmonious facts. One man sees the influence of society molding always the individual.

Another notices that it is the individual in fact that shapes the society. Both are truths and a most admirable harmony. The influence of the society on the individual is the great governing, Educating Conservative element. The influence of the still advancing individual upon society is the great progressive element, raising the standard of knowledge of virtue of piety. Ada. You are certainly a confirmed optimist, Mr. Sanford, though I know you repudiate that title.

How is it that society breeds so many characters that are prejudicial to it? No harmony there. samford you see i am not an optimist for i at once acknowledge that we have had many bad men to combat robbers and thieves of all kinds must at least be kept under if the race cannot be exterminated exterminated i mean by the widening circles of prosperity and intelligence but i have no imaginary project by which i could have relieved society from this duty property must have its temptations to the poor and the ignorant and these temptations the law must neutralize by the penalties and imposes upon the theft ada when i had heard you dilate on the completeness of the whole and how each living thing takes some part in this complete hole i have asked myself whether a thief or even a greater criminal might not justify himself as being a part of a complete hole which would not be complete without him also he might quote pope's famous line all partial evil universal good sanford whatever part he has to perform There can be no doubt of our part towards him.

He may bring it to this past, that the use of his existence is to be hanged for an example. Mansfield, Pope's line, partial evil, universal good, can be only true in this sense that the evil arises out of general laws, themselves wise and beneficent. The evil as it exists then and there is simply detestable, and to be detested. The only good that can be said of it is that it may call forth our ingenuity and effort in its destruction. If there are wicked men who will not let others live in peace and security, they are manifestly the most virulent evils in the world. And if we cannot amend them or till some happy process of amendment is discovered,

we must destroy them or shut them up like wild beasts. Ada What a cold-blooded view of punishment is it That regards it simply as an act of self-defense in society It seems to take no note of the feeling of justice Of desert If I were not animated by the feeling that he deserves his punishment I could never consent to take away the life of a criminal

My heart would fail me Sanford And I am sure that if time were given you for reflection And you had to take life away simply on that feeling of desert, your heart would feel you. Nothing would nerve your hand, let us say to sign the death warrant, except the recognition that such an act was necessary to the preservation of society. Ada, in this consideration, greatest it is, I do not find a basis for my sense of justice. Mansfield, that sense of justice you've desired to be animated by is a very complex sentiment.

We will not attempt its analysis just now. You have sat long enough upon this rank grass. We have been discussing in our desultory manner the subject of human happiness. This of human crime and its punishment, we must postpone to another sitting. Ada. Willingly, it is a gloomy subject that both attracts and repels at the same moment. But rather would I, in the presence of this beautiful nature, think of the variety there are of human happiness, A, and of human virtues. After all, crime is but an exception.

A few of us feel the least temptation to commit a heinous crime. We revolted the thought of it, pry under the thatch of every cottage in Gravenhurst. Peaceful possession, secure lives, the punctually rewarded industry. These are what every inhabitant prizes. Morality is in the main, the chosen mode of life, the chosen mode of reasonable men. Otherwise, I suppose, it would not have been morality, no would have been hedged about by the penalties of law. Mansfield. Very good, Ada.

I, too, if I had any gift of eloquence, if I could speak or write a word that would stir the heart, or bring conviction to a dozen men in England, would take for my theme this marvelous creation of human life. I would speak my word to excite a love and admiration for this great gift of life. I will show men what countless treasures were included in this great gift. Treasures being understood that are generally to be earned. Earned by energy, protected by fortitude.

I have very little to offer to sloth a pusillan amity. Progress and a good day coming. Well, you shall believe devoutly in progress. it is a generous and noble faith, but it means nothing except in the generous and the noble. Progress, oh, by all means. But if you find nothing in the world as it is, worthy of your love and admiration, you may live a thousand years and gain no comfort out of progress of the species. If this commonplace of life, with its kindly affections and its stirring intellect, its gay surprises, its tender sorrows, if this has not been,

one your reverence, I know not what possible utopia can be worth a straw. This commonplace of life would last, I suspect, is long, as long as these are the common places of earth and sun and stars. If, I say, you find nothing divine in the love of woman and of child, in friendship, and steadfast purposes tending to the general good, out of what elements do you expect your progress? Mark this pleasant contrast. Oh, to civilization itself, between the city and the plain, between the town and the country. Each is necessary to the other. The city that feeds upon the plain, diffuses over it the influence of arts, science, mental culture. Note the harmonious varieties of human character that spring up

a variety of scene and occupation. If you set about contriving ideal state or a perfect society, You must leave untouch, this relation, this contrast. You must leave the city for arts and learning, the seat of government and of universities, and out beyond the cultivated fields, with farms and villages and occasionally the park and the palace. May the future grievance contain many a tree who is rationally happy

as we three who are sitting here. Sanford. No very bad wish. we will not make it known as part of our program for the future. Ada! How great become the most trivial cares of existence, such as food and clothing, when we think for all.

When some great principle of patriotism or duty shines over them, the simplest pleasure, when I am concerned that another shall enjoy it, how exalted it has become. The small, familiar, transitory joy, seen in the light of an eternal, truth, the moat, the beam. What transmutations take place in this winter's life of ours? The inexorable need of the hunger-driven animal. Lo, it is a component part of the sweetest of our

Christian charities. Sometimes when I look back on barbarian or savage existence, I shudder to think what life must have been before these transmutations or new combinations arose. Do, I presume, to the slow growth of knowledge or the reason of man. The savage is a very hideous spectacle. Mansfield, to you. But he, as complete in himself as you or I, leads his own life contentedly. Nay, if contentment with himself with the sole test of happiness, which it is not, it is only one amongst many tests.

We should hold the savage happier than ourselves. He is the most conceited of his species. It is indeed a universal kindness of nature that she compensates ignorance by a most triumphant conceit. In the history of religion, which reveals so much of the history, of the whole human mind, it is curious to notice that in those early times, and in those alone, when men had least to boast of, the idea more than once appears that the gods were jealous of mankind. prometheus steals fire from heaven and jupiter is angry and envious men should too nearly resemble the gods samphan a low conception of the gods more than their own conceit must have occasion such an idea i don't know whether we should rank our heathen ancestors scandinavians and others amongst savages but their mode of life as one which are literary men have up late taken under their special patronage

miserable tribes that are struggling with nature for subsistence on some inhospitable soil excite our compassion the tribes that have speared and energy enough for war have escaped from our pity ada perhaps if one thinks of it a second time the terrible despotism the wars of conquest the dissensions and revolutions of what we call civilized states present to still more frightful spectacle my only consolation is to think that in the worst of times there have been million living in their own homes undist stirred by the political tempest raging around them and so we shelter ourselves again in this wee commonplace of life which quietly gathers to itself many a new grace and joy even out of the very stirre and tumult and energy of bind which wars and revolutions have produced mansfield the great barbaric empires of ancient days egyptian or babylonian have civilized nations as we call them seem almost as foreign to us as the wild nomadic tribes that reduce to subjection we sympathize as little with their kings and priests as with the great mass of people whom these together disciplined into manners and methodical industry this mass of people look like great children to us well they enjoy their children the monarch who tyrannizes over them as also their greatest pride they glory in their prostration is he not their monarch a priesthood entertains them ceremonial and brings into their hearts the noble central of worship, am I to distress myself as superstitions, which make these children obedient and

industrious, and one at length these superstitions break down, as they will, before some inquiring mine, am I to alarm myself about the preservation of that degree of virtue they secured? Other superstitions will arise and perform their office. It is never vice that calls forth the new and conquering faith. But I did not intend to. tend to be carried into any review of the past. When I started with the wish that I could help men to form of full and rational, and therefore high estimate of their own lives, I was thinking what humanity is amongst our advanced and cultivated nations.

But we ourselves feel it to be. We are living here in this quiet nook. We are nevertheless, the highest thinking of every capital in Europe reaches us. But now we must homeward. My dear Ada, call your pony. See that lumbering lad, whose aspect first prompted this conversation, as taken mightily to your four-footed friend.

Speak to him, bid him bring the pony. Notwithstanding his loudish appearance, I feel persuaded that a word from you, a service kindly asked of him, one smile from the lady, will give him more pleasure by far than, for instance, the coin as shall slip into his hand. End of Section 9.

The evening of the same day on which the last conversation was held, we were again deep in discussion. On returning from our ride, I had been pressed to dine with a general, instead of proceeding to my own bachelor quarters. Ada made tea for us. In the course of the evening, she reverted to that topic which in the morning she had willingly, she said, relinquished, but which evidently exercised a strong fascination over her. How reconcile with the belief in a beneficent creator, the existence and the punishment of sin? This was her perplexity. I jot down our talk as faithfully as I can, but as it wandered through some subtle trains of thought, I am compelled to condense into a bridge a little.

Ada. I hope it is not from any obtuseness of feeling that when I hear or read of any great terrestrial calamity as earthquakes or the plague, it is not then that I am peculiarly perplexed to justify the ways of providence to men. An earthquake of Lisbon or a plague of Florence, destroys thousands of men, but, after all, it is only another form of death, and thousands of men are dying every day all over the world. Sanford, it is the disorganization of society that constitutes the terrible evil on these occasions. Death, in its ordinary operations, takes here and there, this old man, that young man, in such uncertain and slow manner, that throughout no part of society is the confident expectation of living much disturbed.

There comes a plague or a famine, and no man has a future for which to live. Society collapses. There is nothing but terror or apathy, or wildest levity. Ada. Whatever the nature of such evils, I suppose they must be finally traced to the operation of laws, chemical or physiological, on which our whole mundane system depends. Let us yield our lives to the plague or the inundation. It comes but to this, a few years not enjoyed.

Let us yield our lives cheerfully, since they could not have been wisely preserved to us. But what if there be an evil which casts its shadow, a blackness worse than death, through all eternity? Men have weak and depraved wills. They commit crime, they are justly punished, but the terrible perplexity occurs. Why do the righteous creator of mankind create beings of weak and depraved wills? Or why, if he created them perfect, and they degraded themselves, which is inconceivable, if they were indeed perfect at the first, why is the depraved race allowed to perpetuate itself? How am I to reconcile God the judge with God the Creator? I am scared at my own voice when I ask the question. Perhaps it ought to be repressed, enough that there is a wisdom I cannot understand. And what is faith, if it be not reliance upon a wisdom I cannot apprehend? Sanford.

Sooner or later, we must all end there. In faith in a supreme reason, we can only partly apprehend. But that faith is founded on such partial apprehension as we do attain. If, therefore, we utterly disparage that partial apprehension, we destroy the foundations for that very faith which is to support us where that apprehension fails. It is not a wholesome piety, so it seems to me, which teaches us, under the name of mystery, to force violently together propositions that are flagrantly inconsistent. I cannot see why your question should not be asked.

Mansfield, you yourself, Ada, have a pet heresy of your own, that the punishments of a future life are not eternal. If not eternal, why should it be impossible to reconcile them with some grand scheme for the final recovery, restoration, or perfection of all created beings? If I am called upon to believe that the wickedness of the world terminates in the eternal misery of the wicked, and that the goodness or piety of the world is to terminate in the eternal felicity of the good, and if, moreover, I am assured that the number of the wicked fully equals the number of the good, then it irresistibly follows that God has created equally

for misery and for happiness. I see no escape from this conclusion, unless you have some other knowledge yet to reveal to me. There is here no ultimate predominance of good over evil. There are, so to speak, two separate lines, the one of good. ending in eternal brightness, the other of evil, ending in eternal darkness. It is not a scheme of supreme benevolence that the creation presents to me. Under these circumstances, you have no right to ask me to reconcile future punishments with the belief in a beneficent creator, because you have destroyed my belief in a beneficent creator. I can only retain this belief on the ground that future punishments have some great beneficent purpose, some unknown ground of expediency. Ada,

It might be difficult to find grounds of expediency for punishments short of eternal, but my difficulty does not lie there. The divine punishments of another world are not motives, so to speak, by expediency, or by expediency alone. Divine justice justifies itself. The justice is fundamental an idea as the happy. God creates for both. Our sin is visited because it is sin. Under this view of the divine character, it is difficult to conceive why sin was created or

permitted. Sanford. Might not your difficulty be solved by a re-examination of your theory of punishment or of divine justice? It is connected, I know, with a theory of ethics which happens to be in the ascendant at present. A mysterious right and wrong. Something else than the dictate of human reason judging of truth and happiness is the favorite theory, I believe, of our universities. Nevertheless, think of it. A wrong action or a wrong purpose, which is wrong because it is wrong is visited with a punishment that is just because it is just. According to such a statement, neither the sin nor the punishment admits of any explanation by its relation to that whole of human existence, of which nevertheless it forms a part. Such ideas appear to me to introduce hopeless

confusion. They are obscurities, occasioned by starting with some complex notion which we refuse or neglect to analyze. Ada, I will listen to your analysis, but I will listen to your analysis, but I I have read some analytic explanations of our sentiment of justice, and they have not seemed to me satisfactory. Mansfield. My Ada, if we would speak intelligibly of divine justice, must we not first understand what we mean by human justice? Can we have two ideas of justice or two theories of punishment?

Ada, I suppose not. Human justice is some imperfect striving after the divine justice, or, if that is the more correct statement, divine justice is the amplification and perfection of the human. When we punish a criminal here on earth, we do not punish only from expediency. We say the man deserves his punishment, and without this sentiment of desert, we should not feel ourselves authorized to punish. Man's field. True, we do not punish solely from expediency. We punish, in the first place, from our passion of anger, which prompts us to return injury for injury, and from our feeling of sympathy, which prompts us to resent the injury done to our friends and companions. We punish in the second place

from expediency, that is, from a steadfast purpose to prevent a certain class of injuries in future. But this is not all. Laws being once made, we judge of a man's conduct by its obedience and disobedience to those laws. A new element is thus introduced, the result of the law itself. This sentiment of deserving punishment as a breach of the laws is a consequence of laws themselves. Now, you would start from the sentiment of desert, as if you found it your primary authority for the law itself. Ada. If I said about making a new law, imposing a new penalty, I am at least partly guided by this sentiment, that the man deserves a certain amount of punishment. This sentiment of dessert, which you say is created by the law, is the sentiment by which I legislate, or

partly make the law. Man's field. In making a new law, in devising a new penalty, you would be partly led by analogy to the laws already made. The nature of the penalty you would impose would be decided by the current legislation of the period. In these days, you would probably say that any act that was tantamount to murder deserved death. In a remote period, murder itself was punished by a pecuniary fine, and the sentiment of dessert must have been somewhat different. You say that the sentiment of dessert partly frames the law, no doubt of this, but it does not follow that it was not, therefore, in the first instance, the product of a law. When we make for ourselves a puzzle of this description, there is always some step in the process of development that we have overlooked.

There could be no flute player, unless there was already such a thing as a flute in existence. There could be no flute made, unless there was already a flute player in existence. The puzzle seems hopeless. But, in fact, nature threw the man a reed, and he became flute player, and afterwards flute maker, and his flute playing and his flute-making advanced henceforth together. No penal law is enacted without some sentiment of dessert, and no sentiment of dessert could have existed without a penal law of some kind, more or less distinctly enunciated. The puzzle here also seems hopeless. But nature threw the man his passions, sympathies, habits, customs, and out of the with some rude reasonings on the good of the community he made laws.

Henceforward, he becomes a law observer, has sense of obligation to a rule or law, sense of deserving punishment if he breaks the laws, and this sentiment of obligation or desert afterwards sustains the laws and enters into the manufacture of other analogous laws. Ada Your explanation, if I may pass a compliment upon it, is very clear and distinct,

and yet it is not satisfactory. I find the same puzzlement in the broad field of morality. It is said that my sentiment of obligation comes from the opinion of society, or the opinion in the first place of controlling parents. Well, but the opinion of society is the opinion of a number of individuals. If these individuals had not themselves the sentiment of moral obligation, how could they import it into the general opinion? Cooleridge somewhere states this argument for an intuitive or a priori morality very powerfully.

I wish I had his words here to refer to. Mansfield, I am quite willing, Ada, that you should take our puzzle into the broad field of ethics. However intimately they are blended together, we are capable of separating the judgment of what is wise and human conduct from a personal feeling or motive for acting according to that judgment. The mere feeling of responsibility, or obligation, is, as everyone reflecting upon his own experience must recognize, the result of some command, some threat. It is essentially a sentiment of fear. Mind, I do not say that the complex sentiment we generally speak of as moral obligation is to be resolved entirely into fear,

because with this feeling we have combined our love of goodness and our detestation of what disturbs the peace and happiness of mankind. It is a moral being of the very lowest order who is influenced only by fear of punishment. But without this fear of some kind of penalty, though a man might be very wise and act very wisely, he could not have the special feeling of obligation. Such is the intricate harmony that our human life displays. The highest and the lowest are seen blended together. Fear is that element by the addition of which the last dictate of the reason becomes conscience, as well as reason.

Now you will have no difficulty in admitting that moral obligation, so far as it is a sentiment of fear, proceeds from the power of others over us. It is a sentiment which is imposed upon us by society, by numbers, in which we, in our turn, help to impose upon others. You are in a very small minority when you want to break the rule, in the very large majority when you want to insist upon the rule. Ada.

It seems to me to degrade the sentiment of moral obligation, even regarding it only as the coercive element in a moral judgment, to attribute it to fear of man or to the control of public opinion. Mansfield. There is nothing degrading and living under the control. of public opinion, so long as our reason approves of that public opinion. A cultivated man both lives under the influence of public opinion, and also helps to shape and improve it by his own individual judgment of what is wise or good for all. It is this last judgment and the habit of acting

on it till it grows a necessity in the man that he acts his highest reason, which from the loftiest moral character. But the most cultivated man is not above the aid in support of public opinion, and the least cultivated man is not without some feeling of independence accruing from the exercise of his own judgment. I'm afraid I have interrupted Mr. Sanford, who would have given you a more scholastic explanation than I have done of these ethical perplexities. But I have said enough, I think, to clear the way to an understanding of the nature of our criminal justice. Our punishments can assume no higher character than that of penalties, designedly imposed for the support of a rule of conduct approved by the generality. vindictive passions and sentiments which have grown up under the existence of laws mingle themselves with our jurisprudence, but our punishments, I repeat, can assume no higher

character than that of means to procure obedience to some desirable rule. Ada, perhaps I should find no insuperable difficulty in accepting your explanation if I had nothing to consider but human justice or human punishments. I could understand now, in the first instance, our vindictive and social passions, our habits, customs, and need of mutual protection might lead to laws, and how under those laws a spirit of obedience, and a sentiment of merit and demerit might be cultivated. But how will all this apply to the divine punishments of another world?

We necessarily animate God with a sentiment of justice, yet our sentiment of justice is partly composed of vindictive feeling, or sympathy with vindictive feeling, and it is in part the creature of the law itself, which those vindictive feelings and perhaps a temporary expediency together dictated. This is not applicable to theology. In theology, we want a sentiment of justice at once associating crime and punishment. Mansfield, I do not recognize such want.

God is, with us, that supreme reason which creates or ordains the whole, creates for the good of the whole, or, say, especially for the happiness, for the intellectual, moral, and religious elevation of the human being, the crown and climax of creation. His punishments, whatever they may be, must have their place in the great scheme. They are means to an end. They are not ends in themselves. They are justified by their wisdom. They advance, we may be sure, in some way, the culture, the goodness, the happiness of some great community of created beings. The wisdom or expediency of the divine punishments is surely sufficient ground for them, nor is it possible to invent, for the purposes of theology, a new and a

special sentiment of justice. We have no sentiment which, apart from consideration of expediency, demands with unalterable voice, the punishment of crime. We know of no eternal fitness, which connects punishment and sin, overriding the motives of expediency. When the criminal stands before us convicted and repentant, we as often have the desire to pardon, as a to punish me. Why is it that we do not allow our compassion to dictate to us? Why do we still inflict the punishment that the law had threatened? Because we know that if we spared the criminal, this threat of punishment would lose its efficacy for the future. It is not from the feeling of any eternal fitness between punishment and crime. Society needs this threat, and its efficacy

must be preserved. The divine punishments are motivated by the divine wisdom acting for the good of some great hole. Is this not enough for us to say, and all we can say? Ada. But if I am driven from this hold of an eternal sentiment of justice decreeing punishment, if I must have recourse to expediency to explain all, shall I confess it, I am perplexed by the difficulty of discovering an intelligible ground of expediency. I will not say for eternal punishments, but for any intense prolonged, inflictions imposed in another world. Pain does not reform. or, if it does, new hopes and wider knowledge reform more effectually. No one believes that such inflictions are threatened,

and the threat carried into execution solely to assist our own imperfect tribunals of justice, solely to assist the cultivation of our terrestrial virtue. If such punishments are intense, they produce more misery than they prevent. If their intensity is mitigated, the threat of them, as they are remote and unseen, loses all efficacy, whatever. Those who have undertaken to ground our future punishments upon expediency boldly call in other races of intellectual beings to profit by our terrible example. What the punishment, they have said, of one individual, is to the community, such may be the punishment of one sinful world to the whole universe of habitable globes.

This may be an adequate ground of expediency. But the hypothesis proceeds on a very melancholy estimate of the moral and intellectual culture of the whole universe, everywhere intellectual beings held to their own best happiness by the threat of an extraneous punishment. Mansfield, it is a mere imagination at the best, and these other globes, they are peopleed by beings who either resemble us or not. If they do not resemble us and have not the same weaknesses and temptations,

they cannot profit by the report of our misdeeds and their punishment. if they do resemble us and have our weaknesses and temptations, why, the threat held out of remote and distant punishment, will be as ineffectual or as partial with them as it has been with us. The condemned planets would become very numerous, but although we do not gain much by calling in the inhabitants of other globes, yet it is quite open to any reasoner to assert that there may be grounds of expediency unknown to us. And if, my Ada, we must end at last in something we do not comprehend. Is it not better to rest these future punishments on some grounds of expediency not yet revealed to us, than to rest them on some sentiment of justice altogether inexplicable? Punishment is a means to an end. No other and no higher view can we take of it.

But what end it may answer may be altogether beyond our knowledge? The only possible conception we can form of the morality of God is that he concerns himself for the good of the whole, and the goodness of his creatures. Now, as the whole universe and all God's purposes cannot be known to me, I may readily confess myself incompetent to judge of the expediency of what is to be transacted in another world. But I must believe there is an expediency, and that God acts throughout for some great beneficent purpose.

And this view solves the difficulty you started. If we may consider the justice of God as still having for, for its end, the advancement of the creatures he is formed, there is nothing irreconcilable between the character of God the judge and God the Creator. The punishments of God are, here and hereafter, check, guidance, instruction. Authors note, some of the ethical difficulties that obscure this important topic are touched upon again in conversation five. End of Section 10. Section 11 of Gravenhurst or Thoughts on Good and Evil.

This is a Librevox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Gravenhurst or Thoughts on Good and Evil by William Henry Smith, The Rainbow, or Suffering an Element in Our Highest Form. of mental life, Ada and Sanford. The rainbow which the poets tell us is a product of smiles and tears, certainly of sunshine and shower, may be taken as a type for a large and beautiful range of human thought and feeling, in the composition of which some form of evil, sadness,

or strife has necessarily entered. What is most tender, what is most heroic in life, is of this description, the greater portion of those sentiments with which poetry loves to deal, is of this description. Music, the fine arts, and above all religion, partake largely of this rainbow nature, are products of that joy and grief, which forever intermingle in the atmosphere of human thought. No pensive contemplation, no poetry, no philosophy,

could exist if sorrow and the shadow of death were not thrown over the world. Everywhere, joy and tears, the light and the storm, make the rainbow of our thought life. There is often a subtle happiness where you would least expect to find it. Some faint gleam of purest light steals, for instance, amongst our regrets for a lost friend. The blending of happy memories with our grief converts it for a moment into something that almost looks like happiness. Our dead joys are revived for us even while we think of them as dead. Nay, even great calamities bring with them often a sense of novelty

and an intense expectation which break the suffering and divide our attention. Some of our most poetical, most cherished and pensive states of mind can only express themselves in the language of sadness. We may judge from this whether the melancholy of the poet or the eloquent writer is any valid testimony against the general felicity of mankind. Even the sharp calamities of life that at their actual first endurance were in unmitigated wretchedness, become transmuted to, and, and so muchmuted, in the memory, or rather undergo fresh combinations and so change their character.

The thoughts are reflections of a man, remorse being accepted and the agony of indecision, are never, I believe, wholly painful. I was thus occupied with my rainbow when I encountered Ada on our village bridge, a favourite spot of hers and of mine. It is so near to her own house that she can manage to walk to it and she can stand here without fatigue, for there is a narrow ledge running along inside the stone parapet on which she can rest the weaker foot. She says, smiling at her own infirmity, that she's like those birds who cannot make much either of walking or flying, but who have a marvellous faculty for standing on one leg. She will stand thus, if there happens to be no one else loitering upon the bridge,

for half an hour together, gazing on the stream that flows beneath, or looking onward and upward into the pleasant English sky, cloud brightened as often as it is overcast. clouded. As I approached, she started from her reverie. I, who am in both senses of the word, an old friend, did not scruple to ask what thought it was I had unintentionally disturbed. Ada, a very commonplace one. I was thinking how the life of one's daily wants, labours, and habits flows on steadily enough. Persistently is the stream running here beneath us, but how the higher thought life is beautiful and changeful as the sky above, and the winds that traverse it.

I was trying out of very idleness to shape the thought into a verse. Sanford. And I have disturbed the rhymes, scattered them also to the mercy of the winds. Ada, Not so, I had just got my rhymes complete. Let me say them to you,

that I may keep them safe in my memory. I stand upon the bridge of life. The stream below holds constant course. It brings, it takes, with equal force, it strives with an incessant strife. But the other stream above, the air that plays between the skies and me, to keep them bright,

flows fitfully, will bring the cloud and leave it there. Sandford, you think, then, that in our higher thought life we find greater change in uncertainty than in that which is represented by the current of events? Ada, so far as my own life is concerned,

the train of events is very constant. The train of thoughts is not so. Sadness and doubts deal over me in truth, alas, seems as often to dwell where the shadow lies as where the light is falling. All wisdom is cheerful, is a note I often hear from our contemporary poets and philosophers. We may like to believe this, but the highest thinking is not always the happiest, if I at least may pretend to know anything of the highest. Sanford Since the late reaction against a morbid bironic mood, a mood that had far too much in it,

mere personal discontent to represent the sorrow of high thoughts. It has been the fashion to describe all wise men as preeminently cheerful. Even the author of Hamlet and King Lear is reckoned amongst our smiling sages. The general testimony of mankind, and of that literature which has stood the test of time, is not in accordance with this pleasant verdict. Ada, how could it be? How could the merely pleasurable awake us into intense thought? or how could intense and anxious thought rank amongst the merely pleasurable,

as well hoped to drive the night out of the 24 hours as drive it out of the inmost recesses of our thought? Sanford. One might say that it is this infinite night which seems to surround our little globe that throws an undying interest on its petty transactions and transitory passions. Adda. Speaking of my own experience, thought has been less happy as my horizon of thought has extended, I suffered from many a nightmare when I was a child, but I've suffered more in later times when the dream was fading away, not always, into the light of the morning. Sanford

Yet I'm sure you would not contract your horizon. You want some word to express that happiness which is not pleasure. Ada. Music expresses it to me. I know no other language that does. No, I would not relinquish on any account what little has been granted me of intellectual. vision. Come blindness of the eye, rather. I do not envy the placidity of men and women of manifestly contracted understandings. I might as well envy as I've heard some foolish people say they did,

the still more placid lives of our domestic animals. I delight to contemplate. I have no wish to imitate, the life of any sort of tabby. My cat enjoys her existence in common with me up to a certain point. When in the winter evening I draw the easy-chair towards the fire, she crouches before me on the rug. We both enjoy the light, the warmth, the softness, the repose, and for a moment I distinctly congratulate myself on this perfect cat-light felicity. But this pleasant state of things must be with me the condition only for some higher enjoyment. I must converse with a friend, I must read books, I must think my thoughts, I must lose myself in their labyrinth. the rug, stops where I begin, feels all the peace, the comfort, and the warmth, and stops there,

perfectly content. I see her close her eyes and open them again quite satisfied that everything about her is as stationary as herself. Well, I will not envy Puss. I will take by sympathy her little contented life into my own and so enrich my being with one more kindly sentiment. This is all that I will do, whether the Puss lies at my feet in her own fur upon the rug, or whether she sits in mop cap or pretty ringlets upon the chair before me. Sanford. The relations between you and the tabby could not be better adjusted. People who constantly repeat the same things

lose the point and significance of even those few ideas which make up their monotonous chant. Change and mutability are the necessary accompaniments of intellectual action, and how this changeful activity could have been accorded to us, and we preserved from all sadness and uncertainty, is past my ingenuity to conceive. Again, we often regret, or needlessly satirize in ourselves or others, a certain inconstancy in our opinions. Without some measure of this inconstancy, we should have no opinions at all that were worthy of the name. Adda,

I suppose that all activity of mind as well as body implies change of some kind. Of a moon in a cloudless sky, beautiful as she is, how soon one tires. let the winds blow the great clouds about her, now blotting her from view, now surrounding her with those enormous masses brighter than herself, and I can look forever. How much of motion and of turbulence, turbulence of heart, enters into the composition of what we call the love of nature. When I stand spellbound by the seashore, and thoughts are beating within me, ceaseless as the waves upon the rocks, is it joy or remembrance or hope of joy that makes the charm that enthralls me. Very little, it seems to me, of joy. The grand untiring energy of

nature typified so gloriously in the ocean meets in me with a melancholy, and yet not inharmonious response. Whether the wind blows the spray forward like a wild horse's mane, or whether the long, low wave comes muffled to the shore in its own foam, I've always a response for the ocean, but how rarely is that response a self-congratulation. And as the sea bounds wave after wave to the level shore, the seabird upward and downward with most harmonious contrast describes its waving line above it in the air. Ah, that seabird flying there half-wing, half-wind, so are we all, all that make any flight. We feel that our forces half-nature's half our own. How often have I, poor creeping wanderer, watched its free, bold, and never-drooping wing,

and my heart has gone forth towards it for something in its life that was not mine. There's always some grief in our communion with nature. I stand beneath the solemn yew tree, tree devoted to death and to the past. I hang my own sorrow on its boughs, and lose and receive it back in a thousand thrilling emotions due to our common mortality. Sanford.

You touch a train of thought which my own mind was playing with, when I met you. What is more, you give me in yourself an example of that rainbow life which is born of joy and of suffering. Adau, you and my uncle together have so indoctrinated me with the idea that our life is a varied energy of action or of thought that I find myself looking with a singular toleration on those pains and vicissitudes which seem necessary to sustain this energy. From the movements of an insect to the cogitations of a philosopher, one sees everywhere that some form of fear and danger and distress is playing an essential part. I can watch complacently yonder butterfly, that ought, according to our ideal of a butterfly,

ought to flutter undisturbed from flower to flower. It leads no such undisturbed life. Not flowers alone prompt and direct its flight. All manner of dangers beset its pleasant and fragile existence. Poise throw their caps at it, birds swoop upon the wing. It flutters dizzily on, saved again and to gain by the very waywardness of its flight. Our celestial father has cared for this little creature also. It has endured through countless generations. It has fluttered down to us from paradise, for I suppose it could boast a pedigree as ancient as that child of Adam,

who is now chasing it cap in hand. The ideal that would unite peace and energy, or unite them for any length of time together, belongs to another world and an altered being not to terrestrial man. Sanford. He who is zealously engaged in the search for truth, whether we call him philosopher or man of science, approaches nearest to this ideal. Adda, I, not being a philosopher or man of science, have not found the search for truth

accompanied with much peace of mind. My little share of such noble toil is still, however, that which I prize high. in my existence. I imagine that in a future life, this present terrestrial being will be looked upon as we look back upon a troubled dream, of which we remember little but the trouble.

Some recollection of it must, I suppose, remain, otherwise how recognise our personal identity or the continuity of our existence. But I recall from the idea that we shall be always turning over the pages of our memory and reading the frivolous, blundering, incoherent entries in it, strange brain book a blotted register whose leaves turn by some magic of their own and open too often at the place of least pleasant reading

most mysterious brain book and we see that here in this life it becomes defaced and torn and stained and scribbled over till nothing further can be registered and the leaves turn slowly and open only at a few of the earliest pages well would you have this brain book restored as some expect and ask for every one word of it made legible, every page of it opening in its turn through eternity? Oh, better far some new brain book to be filled with a nobler story, who would wish to be reading eternally in this old one? Sanford Immortality is a great hope, but a dim conception. We only risk our hope when we attempt to render its nature distinct. Our ideal acts beneficently upon the actual and present existence because it is not another complete life that we, in fact, depict to ourselves, but only some isolated sentiment of this life that we glorify and project and follow. We know not how, into eternity.

Ada, we are but specks of light moving through infinite space. We move towards an impenetrable darkness. We live behind an impenetrable darkness. It is light, but just where we are. Is it not strange that I always imagine myself alone in my heaven? Yet it would be a terrible fate to pass eternity in solitude or in the felt presence only of the eternal. Is this because, as you seem to suggest, we can do something towards imagining an immortal soul, but very little in shaping for ourselves the life and society of immortal creatures? Look at that beam of light which strikes suddenly down from heaven to the earth. how glorious it is, a very beam from heaven. Now it is gone. A little opening in the cloud,

a subtle mist in the air, and that was our beam. Our own mist made visible. Still, let us say, touched and irradiated by light from heaven. That beam suggests an illustration for what seems to me a not quite unphilosophical statement, though like the mist it is somewhat hazy. I will hazard it. You shall criticize and contradict when we next meet. Religion is a truth which for us reveals itself in some form of the imagination. Our reason criticizes the form and helps to mold it to the changeful requisitions of society and of science. But still, to the end of time, we have only heaven's light on some subtle mist of the imagination. You shall show me where I am in error, as I suspect I am, when we meet again. At present I see that my good mother has sent a messenger for me. I must return.

Sanford. The messenger brings a campstool in his hand. It is rather an invitation to stay out a little longer in this bright morning. Let me place it for you by the side of the river. Accordingly, we left our position on the bridge and walked down to the banks of the river where we soon found a pleasant spot for the camp stool. Being near the Welsh hills, the steep banks of our little river have a good deal of the vegetation that distinguishes a mountain stream, and especially it is rich in ferns. A glorious specimen on which the sun shone, as I arranged the seat, arrested our attention and was the means, I think, of breaking the course of our conversation, or rather of giving it a fresh starting point. This fern, with its magnificent fronds crowning

the bank, reminded me of a previous occasion on which I had surprised my contemplative friend in one of her reveries. I recalled the circumstance to her. I reminded her that this was not the first time that I had interrupted the formation of one of her idle verses, as she called them. Ada. Indeed, what was the rhyme about? I've entirely forgotten it. Sanford. I have not. Shall I repeat the lines? Ada.

No. I've always found that if any thought of mine had or seemed to have the hue of poetry upon it. I worked it into very palpable prose by the attempt to put it into verse. Sanford. Let me repeat the verses, if only to prove the tenacity of my memory. You called them beneath the trees. I hear no tender madrigal. I muse no answer, gay or stern. I watch the sunlight slanting fall upon this coronal of fern. Both it and I, by winds unshaken, an hour of peace together spend, one silent, painless step is taken towards the inevitable end. I'd forgotten how melancholy a tone they assume, or I would not have repeated them, Ada.

There's not much meaning in them of any kind, but I find nothing painful in the subject they obscurely allude to. This lameness and the increasing ill health to which it indirectly has led have been perhaps compensated by a certain measure of contemplative thought that would not have been mine under other circumstances. My chief regret has been that they have limited my intercourse with nature. Only once and long ago have I been amongst high mountains. Oh, to be alone again, once more up amongst the hills. I climb, I see the silent shadow walking, as spirits walk along the side of the neighbouring mountain. How still it all is! Oh, youth somewhere

solitary amongst the Alps. Repine at nothing, least of all, it. your own solitude or isolation? What might, what freedom, what self-possession is yours? Sanford. The beauty of inanimate nature is some reflection of human love and human greatness. Yet how often we contrast nature with man. Adda, we give to nature all the peace we have and all the peace that we have not, so that she is at once our image and our contrast. But I was going to observe that regret alone is hardly misery. I think it is only where some feeling of terror mingles with the gloom that our darker hours are really miserable.

Sanford, that feeling ought not to have mingled much with your existence? Ada, life is sometimes very terrible. Perhaps I should say that death, not life, has been made a terror to us. Over our hours of solitary and speculative thought, there broods of fear and a sense of responsibility, which were unknown to the freer heathen, how much else was also unknown to him, it is not requisite to add.

Sanford. Whether an altogether calmer and less emotional faith might not accord better with the cultivated mind, I will not undertake to say, but this is plain that the peculiar and intense emotions of love and gratitude, which distinguish our own religion, could not exist without the opposite phase

of an unspeakable fear. No better illustration could be given of the rainbow character of our mental joys than we should find in that halo of glory which surrounds a Christian's brow. There is an agony in our religion which I, for one, will not underrate, but it is an essential element in a faith that, I need not say, has fed the world with loftier and more tender emotions, and led to purer and more loving lives than mankind had ever known before. at a strange subject this of religion, where every error you can mention has its beneficial result. Every superstition has some beautiful offspring, holds up its smiling infant to your face, and you cannot strike. I cannot strike, what doubt I have, but makes me more complete a slave. My late father was especially fond of religious books, and amongst religious books of the biographies of pious men. He delighted to read of their conversions and their deaths.

The house was abundantly supplied with works of this description, and when a girl I read many of them. I will confess to you that the description of the mental agonies attendant upon the conversion of some of these pious men left a stronger impression upon my mind than their subsequent joy and exaltation. Their danger was mine, their exultant rapture I did not reach. Not everyone has the temperament of hope or the confidence that can, appropriate the promises of what Milton calls an enormous bliss. Men of blunt, untutored susceptibilities, who cannot, if they would, fix their attention for any length of time

of what is remote and unseen, may believe in any burning tartar as they please. They seem to derive from it nothing worse than a passing and very tolerable excitement. Their torpid faculties are warmed into action by this subterranean heat. If they stand upon the brink as they tell you of an awful precipice, they do not think that theirs will be the foot to slip. I do not call upon you to waste compassion on our loud-throated pietists,

who moan very audibly over agonies they fully expect to escape. There's also another and very different class of men who will not need our pity. Pilemic divines are too busy in shaping their orthodox systems to feel much of the terror of them. Their learning is an armor of defense as well as a weapon of attack. Even impassioned, eloquent men, if strenuously occupied with their oratorical labors, throw off on others in their very eloquence the fire that might have consumed themselves. Chemists show us that in the very centre of a flame that scorches everything about it, there's a cool and tranquil spot, the head of a college,

zealous for the integrity of his doctrinal scheme, the popular preacher whose very occupation is to diffuse the terror he holds as solitary, are personally safe. They, for the most part, will be very genuine, very busy, very laborious, and very calm believers. It is a different matter when a terrible belief falls upon a sensitive self-scrutinizing mind whose energies are not carried off in labors for the conversion or the government of other men. Such a one puts before himself an ideal of moral and religious perfection, unattainable it is confessed by mere mortal man, yet obligatory on him. In vain he makes some advanced towards his ideal. The susceptibility of his pious conscience increases with his progress in piety.

At each hastened step, his terror gains upon him, he sees the impossibility of attaining his ideal even more clearly as he makes efforts to approach it. That ideal rises as he rises. The higher the ground he stands on, the more lofty and inaccessible the mountain top above him. He does not venture to say to himself that a standard unattainable by man cannot be the standard by which man is to be judged. God judges, he's been told, according to his own perfect holiness. Infinite goodness can admit no compromise with evil. Strange logic that measures the guilt of the creature, not by the powers of the creature, but by the perfection and purity of the creator, Sanford. But do you not forget that the standard required is rather one of faith than of holiness?

The self-condemned is but to throw himself on the grace of God and the perfection he desires will be wrought within him, by higher power than his own. Ada, I know, but this very sentiment of faith is part of the Christian's ideal and not the part which all men find most easy to attain. Read the memoirs of the pious. Some, by an act of faith of this description, fling themselves at once from extreme despair to extreme exultation. Others tremble and linger along, or sway to and fro with dreadful oscillations, before such happy transition is affected. The history of those who have uttered failed, no one has recorded. Only leap with faith, says the bold explorer of these spiritual heights

to the more timid mountaineer. Only believe that an invisible hand will sustain you. Only throw yourself upon this invisible power, and fearful as the chasm or the gulf may be, you will find yourself landed on the other side of it. Alas, he stands on the edge of the chasm and cannot throw himself upon invisible hands. He lacks the courage of this faith. In addition to all this, he be able to begins to doubt whether his bold advisor has correctly interpreted the sacred message he undertakes to deliver. His misery is complete. But why need we pursue this melancholy theme? Sanford. I apprehend the numbers are a few, in whom our religious teaching produces this painful result. Adda. No very intense affliction can last long, or last long without

any pauses and intervals of respite. But I believe there are many whose early education has left a terror that, to the end of their days, revisits them from time to time, and which constantly throws over their best and highest speculations a sense of danger and of guilt. Sanford, you touch there upon an evil which an intellectual age has often lamented, namely, that disbelief, which is or may be a pure act of the judgment, should be branded with the character of guilt. I have been lately reflecting on this subject. It is commonly said that the formula, believe or perish, represses inquiry. I think on the contrary that modern Europe owes to this formula the amount of religious inquiry we find in it. The old religions were religions of rights and

ceremonies which had merely to be practiced. The new was a religion of doctrines which in order to be believed must first be defined and in some sense understood. What were these saving doctrines became a momentous inquiry? There is no need to say that the inquiries. The inquiries is no need to say that the inquiry was often limited within a very narrow arena. This compression, however, made it the more intense in its character. It confined and animated the controversy. In heathen times, only a few philosophers were interested in what we call religious truths, that is, truths which can be supported by human reasonings. But wherever Christianity has continued to be a system of doctrines, and has not sunk, as amongst some ignorant populations it has done, into a mere mythology,

there the people at large have become interested in abstract religious reasonings, and once interested in such reasonings, the barriers of churches and sects will not always be found to be impossible, will at least here and there be overlept by the boldest of the flock. A doctrinal religion that rests salvation on a creed has been the main instrument of exciting thought amongst the people. Adah. It seems to me, Mr. Sanford, that you are very busy of late

in finding a spirit of good in things evil. I confess to you that I feel this course of observation very embarrassing. If I saw so much utility in error as you do, I'm afraid I should be in danger of losing my love of truth. Sanford. Not so. There's no inconsistency between a genuine love of truth

and a readiness to acknowledge that any great idea which has ruled the world under the title of truth and operated widely on human society, must have had an adaptation to the times in which it predominated. Remember that no age chooses error in preference to truth. It lives on its error, taking it for knowledge. It lives with the sentiment of truth, and we ourselves can do no more. It must always be an irresistible impulse and the greatest of all our achievements

to discover and proclaim the truth. Those who produced their well-adapted error produced it as an eternal truth, else it would not have answered its purpose. And we also think are eternal truths from a given position of human society, and may be producing new adaptations to new forms of that society. Ada, you even seem disposed on one occasion to defend persecution, how you can applaud a saving creed as an instrument for exciting thought, and also approve of that persecution which represses such thought as it excites, I cannot comprehend.

Sanford Never, never did I approve of the persecution that represses thought. What I said was this. There's a period in the life of a society when the action of the state is not to repress thought, for no thought has been developed, but to impress on blank intelligence certain opinions or faiths. This action of the state power may be beneficial. The society advances, thought has been excited, and the state power becomes then repressive, and acts prejudicially.

But no power of this kind can be suddenly withdrawn, and to a certain extent one may look upon a repressive persecution as the inevitable overflow of a power once simply of an institutional character. Indeed, there is nothing I value so highly as the liberty that sets free the intellect. But toleration is in a peculiar manner the result of a large culture of the human mind, and cannot be expected in the earlier stages of society. Definite ideas of the province of jurisprudence and of the nature of the act, which ought to be the subject of a penal law,

a loyalty to society which does not need their support or require the unanimity of religious creed, respect to those intellectual energies of thoughtful men by which they are led on from truth to truth. Elevated notions on religion itself. All these are elements of that state of public opinion, which would be truly tolerant. Happily, the mere balance of religious parties has produced in this and other countries of Europe,

an enforced toleration, a compromise, a truce, under which the public mind is advancing to the true attitude of voluntary forbearance and mutual respect. Ada, I perceive that this progress of society sets you at ease on many points. I must try what it will do for me. Perhaps we hear the agitation only of what will by and by be inequitable true. The stream we hear amongst the rocks will fertilize some other land. Perhaps that simpler form of Christianity which my soul is longing for may be the Church of the Future, which others will believe in, quite peacefully and approvingly.

I may not be altogether wrong socially in giving way to my own individual perception of the truth. Sanford, you cannot be. Ada, you shall explain this to me some other day. Now I must be going. Will you give me your arm? You've assisted my broken steps before this. End of Section 11, read by Sandra. Section 12 of Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil.

This is a Livervox recording. All Liverwax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil, by William Henry Smith. Conversation 4. The Development of Human Society, inseparable from contest and division. Part 1 Mansfield, Ada, Sandford.

We were again assembled in the General's Library. One of us was turning over the leaves of the polio edition of Captain Cook's voyages. Mansfield. How that book haunted me when I was a boy. What a longing and inspired to travel another club. and amongst other races of men, the canoe of the savage, the palm trees of oldahidi, and the graceful men and women dancing beneath them. These were the marvels of the world to me. I did not suspect that an English home, a summer's day in this northern island, with a few

white-friendly faces round me, was the last most marvelous product of our habitable and our living world. Now, I would not part of one such day for all that the islands of the Pacific or the whole continent of Asia could bestow. Ada. But you were glad to have seen of the climates and other races. I confess to a great curiosity to know what a savage really is. Miansfield. My eye just fell now on a passage in that book you were turning over, which does not speak very highly in favor of the savage. Captain Cook somewhere tells us that he might have exterminated the whole population or the island he was visiting. But every tribe came in turn to ask his help to destroy some neighboring tribe.

One sees a mere aggregate of men or families, getting their subsistence each in the same way, and bound together for the sake of that strength of attack or defense, which union gives them. Our Prince Sanfittier would tell us, with his usual philosophic impartiality, that union springs from hostility as well as affection, or rather that the union within and the hostility without spring up together, that the first friendly compact was also a hostile one, and that society was inaugurated by hate as well as love. Sanford, the tribe, as you remark,

though a gathering together of men by their social affections, is defined and cemented by some common danger. And if we trace the onward progress or development of society, we shall find that the coherence of any class or order of men has been preserved by its antagonism to some other class. When an aristocracy, for instance, arises, the union that constitutes it a class is manifestly due to the common desire to dominate and rule of the rest of society. Society develops itself through its earliest stages by the separation into classes which act and react upon each other. First comes a ruling class of wealthy and strong-headed bin. No bad institution, though it has a look of harshness.

Then an intellectually ruling class, a class of thinkers, priests, poets, philosophers, all in one, makes its appearance. A sheltered space is fine. in the expanding organization of society for mental industry. The grand task of man, the discovery of truth commences. By and by the intellectual class further divides, the poet separates from the priest and the philosopher from both. Now this process of development,

this formation of the classes and divisions of men, though in some cases the result of the quite peaceful and gradual accession of knowledge or of new ideas, is in other cases quite inseparable from contests and animosities of some description or other where we find a very strong spirit of principle of union in any one body of men we find also that that body stands opposed in some manner to other bodies of men thus the union of man with man a thing we especially admire and approve is intimately connected with opposition between man and man a thing we very naturally lament, and do all we can to appease. Mansfield. Your case is made out in the National Union, which is a compact for offense and defense. Small states are tribes, amongst which none has obtained a great predominance,

are equally animated by the spirit of conquest and the spirit of defense. When nations of unequal magnitude of power have grown up in juxtaposition, we have the patriotism of defense, developed signally in the one, and the patriotism of conquest in the other. They must always coexist. We sympathize more cordially, as is quite fit, with the patriotism that repels invasion. But this could not have been excited without the patriotism of conquest. Without an Edward, no Wallace, without the Persian host, no marathon. Sanford

good, and looking within the society itself, we find that the union of a class is accompanied by hostility to some other class. It is not the hostility of war, or it would be incompatible with the national union, but it has often approached it, as when a privileged class of nobles sustained themselves by domination of the common people. Such a class has the virtues and the vices which power produces, the more peaceful unions of men, of trade, and commerce, the guilds and corporations of past times, were in part the result of the license of the noble or warlike class. They have generally been organizations for self-defense, a priestly class, though its function is of the highest order, as its union cemented by the necessity to bend itself against other classes,

and by the desire to subjugate the people. It is animated both by the spirit of conquest and the spirit of defense. As we ascend into still more subtle distinctions, which modern society displays, the nature of the opposition is still more subtle and refined in its character. The manners of the gentry are partly sustained by their contrast to those of the common people, the temper of the philosopher, by the headstrong faith of the moral, multitude, the saint is partly uplifted by his antagonism to the world. Whether it is a stoical

philosophy or an evangelical church, the highly exclusive standard of the little world within is supported by its opposition to the greater world without. Ada, when a spirit of war runs down through all society, from the savage to ourselves and ourselves in our best of moods, but the war tempers itself and becomes only in opposition of thought, opinion, manners. Mansfield. There is one instance belonging to our times, which you might have added Sanford, I mean the union of the workmen to defend their interests, or their supposed interests, against the capitalist. These unions have been occasionally productive of great mischief, but through all their mischief I describe and must appreciate the union itself.

Banded together against the capitalist, the workmen have learned to unite for a common interest. I could wish them to understand their own position better than they seem to do, but I must admire the spirit of union, which has enabled men to endure much hardship, in defense of what they believe, their common interest. the efforts which the higher classes have made to assist in the elevation of the workmen shall have no disparagement from me, but all the bland teaching imaginable of another class can do nothing for them, compared to a spirit of union such as this, a determination to defend and to advance their own interests as a body. Sanford, that is rather a bold assertion. It is well we do not live in a man.

manufacturing district. We should be set down for Democrats and agitators. Mansfield. We live here like the gods, Sanford, embracing in our calm survey the interests of all classes. When these conflicts will come forward, pure equity and more stable peace, who knows what ultimately our class moralities, which have raised each class in turn, may not submerge in one great sentiment of concern for the interest of the whole. whole. But meanwhile, these class moralities, if they are found in one section of society, should be founded others also.

Sanford. Next, let us mark this. In a rude of primitive state of society, man is chiefly educated by his relationship with nature. The soil, the climate, the wild beasts about him, have more to do with his development than ideas gathered from his fellow men. When knowledge of various kinds has been attained and incorporated at arts and institutions, the proportions are altered. The man is educated more by the society of fellow men into which he is born than by his direct relationship with external nature.

The very society which is itself the production of human thought becomes the mold for the formation of successive generations of men. Ada There is a striking analogy here between the growth of a tree and the growth of a society. Each year the summer leaves add to the stem and the branches, and each successive year the leaves are produced in greater numbers and are uplifted higher and higher into the blue air by the rising stem and the expanding branches. Only our society tree does not grow. It seems, with the same tranquility as its prototype,

From roof to topmost branch, there is constant stirring controversy and interminglings of love and hate. How plainly everything speaks of a progressive development, here is literature, what an instrument of culture is, indispensable as it seems to us, yet it had to be written by the race of men which was to profit by it. Suppose that history had given us no account of a people without our literature. we must still have inferred that a time existed when men had no books, when they had not even any oral literature, and the sacred books of a nation, which in one aspect form but a branch of its literature. These two had to be written, had to be thought out. But I fear I interrupted you, Mr. Sanford. Sanford, not at all.

Your observation concurred with when I was going to make. There is one class of ideas, the religious, which more than any other, molls the character of men. It is a class of ideas also which, from its nature, excites the strongest emotions. Add to all this, that it is a class of ideas which lies open to much debate and opposition. Now, by what conceivable contrivance could it have been brought about, that the necessary a discussion of these ideas could have taken place without leading to the most violent contest between the partisans of the old ideas and their assailants. The virtues of the Commonwealth have been long associated with their teaching.

I'll avoid a terrible collision. Mansfield, here certainly there can be no advance without conflict. It is not only the gathered truth that the individual born into a given society receives. The traditional era is just as zealously adopted, but a system of religious opinions that has been made an instrument of education for the whole community is no longer a mere collection of truths or propositions addressed to an intellect, which is free to choose or to reject. The interests of society have gathered around such a system. It is enforced by all on each, just as a rule of morality is enforced, and individual men may for a long time secretly canvass a dispute such a system

before they will venture openly to disavow it. Truth to their minds seems at variance with expediency. All this, as you say, appears inevitable. Neither need we, on this great subject to religious development, turn over the pages of history for an example. Over all Europe, there is going on at this present moment, a contest between old and the no. Amongst Catholic nations this conflict may again assume the form of a religious war. Let us hope that, in Protestant countries, it would be limited to the bitterness of controversy. In England, we have happily in the arena of a free parliament, in which our disputes may one day be fought out. Ada, I wonder whether posterity, writing the history of the times we live,

live in will speak of them as remarkable with the agitation of religious questions. Mansfield. There is evidently more commotion in this region of thought than there was half a century ago. Whether it will end at any results which history will have to record, who can tell? Perhaps it is a movement whose results will be deferred for many centuries. Perhaps it is a movement merely of oscillation. It is almost impossible to decide. Each one of us is tempted to give his verdict according to the bias of his own opinions. We are all agreed that truth must ultimately prevail, and each one believes, of course, that his own religious convictions are the truth. Whether the old and the new will triumph,

will be very confidently and quite oppositely predicted by the partisans of the old and the No. Nay, the very accuracy of these titles Old and Noe, will be often a subject to controversy, and what one proclaims to be the new theology. Another will describe as an ancient exploded error, or miserably imperfect theology. Ada, what do you mean, Uncle, by the New?

But there are so many kinds of the Noot. There is the Neology of the Christian Divine. there is a theism of the philosophical divine. Mansfield. Very true, Ada. The name takes various forms. In some it means a new interpretation of Revelation, and others it is the revived contest between reason and revelation.

I am not discussing the subject from my own personal point of view. I am rather looking at English society, and I ask myself what it is that distinguishes our personal point of view. myself what it is that distinguishes our present state of religious commotion from that of preceding centuries. In the two great subjects of study, history, and the physical sciences, considerable advances have been lately made. These advances had told upon theology. In some, the influence exhibits itself in a modification of the generally received form of Protestant Christianity, and others it displays itself and a wish to place religious truth on the sole basis of the human reason.

Which of these parties will prevail, or will either of them prevail? He must be something of a prophet who can determine. I never yet attended a popular lecture on science, where the lecturer did not conclude, with assuring his audience that there was no discrepancy between the two great teachers, science and revelation, and the lecturer was always applauded for this comfortable assurance. What more certain sign could I have that there exists an uneasy feeling as to the perfect harmony between these two great teachers? But the applause, which invariably greets the lecturer,

maybe also said to prove that such uneasy feeling is kept in due subjection, that it is a secret which his audience do not even utter aloud to themselves. The mass of English society, strong in numbers, appears to stand rooted in its ancient faith. The impenetrable forest stands firm. Each tree sheltered was sustained against the wind by that very forest which it helps to make. Sanford. Here and there are forests, whether for good or for ill, seems to open to the wind. Mansfield.

Yes, it is dangerous to talk in metaphor. there are indications in our literature which show considerable movement in that class, which perhaps does not generally attend popular lectures upon science. Sanford, you must have noticed on your return from India that the tone of our controversial literature had somewhat changed during your absence. Mansfield, when I returned to England, nothing struck me more than the increased seal and earnestness in all parties throughout the domain.

of religious inquiry. But that which seemed to me most noteworthy was the approximation between a philosophical and critical section of the Christian Church and those who would powerfully trust themselves to the speculations of human reason. It seemed to me that there was a small party almost prepared to yield the principle of revelation, if they could be assured that certain great religious truths would be generally acknowledged as founded on human reason. On the other hand, a grave and pious skepticism has arisen amongst us, such as feels its responsibility to God and man, and asks itself anxiously how it is to take charge of society,

if society should be thrown upon its hands. I could not but observe how much there is of the believer in our modern skeptic, how much are the skeptic in some of our modern believers. Ada And how much also of new, and ardent faith in some of our modern Christians. Mansfield, it may be so. You have read more of this literature, Aida, than I have done.

What has made itself evident to me is rather a new spirit of criticism than a new spirit of faith, and a spirit of criticism whose tendency is hostile to what, for the sake of brevity, one may call the principle of revelation. if we were to limit our scrutiny to what is passing in one portion only at the wide field of controversy, we should say that it was this principle which was being put upon its trial. Ada, you would not say that it was the intention of such critics to throw their weight on the side of reason as opposed to revelation. They only wish, as it appears to me, to harmonize the truths derived from both sources. mansfield i do not judge of their intention i speak only of a tendency which they probably would dispute still less would you hear from me any censorious judgment on the quite indisputable discrepancy between some of their conclusions and those articles of their church to which they have subscribed

it is an immoral thing formally and on certain public occasions to assent to statements we do not really believe a subscription to an elaborate series of theological propositions by a young man of two or three and twenty we can all remember what clever so satisfied young gentlemen we were at that age how much we knew how little we had thought cannot be supposed to bind a man even not to examine these problems or, if he examines, and descends from some of them, not to express his convictions, but to play the part of a hypocrite during the rest of his life. Our legislators should take the case into consideration and modify the act of uniformity. I am only concerned with the tendency exhibited in our literature, whether lay or clerical. For instance, some of our biblical critics, disclosing on the earlier revelation to the Hebrews, explain much of it as adaptation to the ignorance of the age and the peculiarities of the people.

It is true, they observe, that we see those same ideas, customs, and rights prevalent amongst the Jews, which, when we meet with them amongst the pagans, we unhesitatingly describe as errors and superstitions, the results of fanciful analogies or of human imaginations. We have a temple in which a national God is supposed to reside. We have propitiation by sacrifice. We have the slaughtered ox, the libation, the oracle, the belief in divine judgments executed supernaturally in this world. All these, they say, were adaptations to the weakness of ignorance of man. If so, we naturally ask why the Hebrew mind could not produce for itself these adaptations as well as the Greek or all D. in mind. It is not very logical to call them

adaptations to the errors of a given epic. They are the errors themselves, the mullids of religious thought that mark a certain stage in human development. Ada. But in the revelation to the Hebrews, these errors of mistaken rights were introduced to obtain ready admission the certain truths which were exclusively revealed to them. Mansfield, I am not sure that the class of critics I am speaking of would agree with you that the Hebrew's word any time in exclusive possession of the great truths you allude to. They stand preeminent among the nations of the earth for their piety, with their sentiments of devotion.

but such great truths as monotheism and the immortality of the soul apparently arise in the human mind, in their time at place, quite as spontaneously as believed in oracles, or the efficacy of sacrifice. The Hebrew certainly did not teach all other nations, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. But I am not entering myself into these controversies, but I wanted to observe with regard to, to this theory of adaptation is, that the critic who had Tofsit must necessarily sit in judgment upon the revelation itself, and decide, by appeal to the reason of mankind, to the reason, in fact, of his own cultivated contemporaries, what in that revelation is true or false, what portion was provisional and expedient only, and what remains as eternally true.

Ada I have never felt distressed my difficulties met with in the Old Testament I am not both Jew and Christian A religion comes in with Christ End of Section 12 Section 13 of Gravenhurst Or thoughts on good and evil This is a Libervox recording

All Librevox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer here, please visit Lepervox.org. Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil, by William Henry Smith. Conversation 4. The Development of Human Society

inseparable from Contest and Division, Part 2. Mansfield. But our critics extend the same mode of criticism from the Old Testament to the New. Here, too, we meet the same adaptation. A people, for instance, who believe in devils, had their belief in devils frankly sanctioned.

Here, too, an ignorant, imaginative, quite unscientific populace was addressed, and the address adapted to its prepossessions. Here, the critic tacitly places himself in the position of judging what part of the revelation remains true for him. I am far from accusing the neologist, as he is turned, of intending to subvert the authority of revelation. But I say that he assumes, tacitly or openly, that there are parts of which we outgrow. This once admitted, who is to say how much we are to outgrow, or when we ceased, or shall cease from growing.

No authority is really left but that of human reason. This very separation from the Old Testament would you, with so many others, seem very willing to make, would be itself a most astounding assertion. of the supremacy of human judgment. The whole doctrine of the messiahship of Christ would need some new interpretation. I know not what license it would not be necessary to take with the second revelation after having dismissed the first. One learned man, and not a layman,

who was but is no longer a contemporary, seem to suppose to cut the cable and swing loose from the Old Testament, nay, to swing loose from all miracle, as a conception belonging to the old and bygone world. The same writer permitted, indeed, the faithfuls of belief in miracles, but gave at the same time such a description of the respective provinces of faith and reason, as put the partisans of the former entirely out of the pale of argument. Ada, faith, or the truth derived from Revelation, is surely the truth that.

the complement of reason or the truths derived from the normal exercise of our mind, not the antagonist. There must be a harmony between the two classes of truth. We must at least believe that this harmony would be perceived if the knowledge derived from our own reason were more complete. I apprehend the difference lies here. If a man starts from revelation, he charges the obscurity and conflict he meets with, to the defect of the knowledge obtained by his reason. If he starts from reason, he charges the obscurity and confusion he meets with upon revelation.

Meansfield, Very true, very true, I am only criticizing our modern critics. Some take me a fragment of the New Testament, and a rectoryt agreed upon that. One picks me out this beautiful text, The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, and forthwith runs up a system,

in accordance with our latest notions of education and progress. Heaven is a state of mind and not a place, and a state of mind that is to grow more complete and more general with the increasing intelligence of successive generations. Thus Christianity is the great instrument of our progress, and itself refines with that progress it aids. All this is in perfect unison with our present modes of thinking. Moreover, it occurs.

expresses an actual fact, and a phase of the subject that is most literally true. But how am I to take this text, and ignore a hundred others which are conceived in a quite different, an antique-bald thought, which are based on the conception of an early and abrupt termination of our terrestrial humanity, and in the order of things attained, not by subsequent generations of living men, but by the risen dead? Ada, I do not know to whom you allude in your last instance. I have heard laymen content themselves, for a moment, with such partial representations of Christianity, but no systematic writer on theology.

Mansfield, such train of thought has come before me. I will not be positive from what quarter, perhaps from someone more poet than divine. The severest blow, however, that in my time has been the same. dealt against revelation, came from one who is certainly no poet, came from a metaphysician, the Oxford champion of orthodoxy. The metaphysics of the Bampton Lecturer, who lately excited so much attention, may, for all I know, stand their ground with any other system, whether of German or Scotch extraction. With these, I entered into no controversy. Such limits as he describes may exist to the human intellect, though I should be sorry to believe it.

A true conception of God, or of the absolute, the title Hebrew verse, may be simply impossible. But if so, no language, whether spoken by a man working miracles or not, can reveal Him. Revelation of God is simply impossible. The great argument from design gives us the attributes of intelligence and benevolence. We say we have before us an intelligent and benevolent being. Resting in this argument, we have a distinct, though partial, conception of God, and one from which we can reason. Now it would be extreme want of candor for anyone accustomed to these discussions,

to ignore the difficulties which many sincere and powerful thinkers find in this argument from design, or in the conception of God to which it leads. Let us say that our metaphysician has found these difficulties insuperable. We throw not the least reproach upon him on this account, but the flagrant and unpleasing contradiction lies here, that it should be such a man who stands forward to enforce upon us the belief in the miracle. A miracle without a God is simply an unexplained fact, an exceptional power which some person, who is or seems a human being,

possesses. On what ground am I to infer that a human being, who works a miracle, therefore knows everything, or knows God? To one who already believes in a God, the miracle itself immediately connects the man with God. God works the miracle through him, and God speaks through him. My faith is in God. But if I could place myself in the position of a man who witnessed a miracle, and who did not already believe in a creator. My faith must entirely rest on this wonderful man before me. The ordinary process of reasoning by which the miracle convinces is gone. This wonderful man is, for the instant, the only God I know.

My faith is in him. Ada. I thought it was admitted by all our logicians that in order to base other religious truths on the miracle, the belief in God must first be recognized as an independent truth of the human reason. I presume the Bantam Lecturer would admit that nature gives us some simulacrum of God upon which the worker of miracles proceeds to construct other useful or regulative thoughts or adaptations. Reason and revelation together give us a certain adapted representation of the deity on which human piety can be founded,

but which the advanced intellect of some amongst us detects to be a mere adaptation to our infirmity. I can understand some such reasoning in a skeptic. I've had thought something like these myself, when I have been in a desponding mood, but then, in that mood, miracle and inspiration were but other names for human imaginations. I will not meddle with the Oxford Medicians,

physician. If he can reconcile his doctrine of the impotence of human reason with belief in revelation, I, for one, feel no interest in such an achievement. But I confess that I follow with my utmost attention the laborers of these, who employ their philosophy and learning in so modifying the teaching of the church as to bring it into accordance with the historical knowledge and the advanced science of the age, the whole 39. What if only nine articles remain to us? What if only a few words of Christ could be blazoned forever upon our banner, and lead us on to conquest over evil? A few words from the eternal God might be hope and guidance to millions after millions, to countless generations of mankind. You'd think that the elimination from our sacred books

of what is imperishable truth from what was transitory in its nature cannot be logically affected. It must be all or none. When the first school of Protestantism arose, how many evil and acute Catholics predicted that it would be impossible for those who relinquish so much to retain anything at all. Protestantism was confidently proclaimed to be the prelude to infidelity. The prelude has been playing. these 300 years. Mansfield.

And a good Catholic might perhaps say that, at last, the prediction was about to be fulfilled. I do not say so. Another three centuries will probably be listening to the same prelude. The Lutheran Reformation was built on faith, on an ardent and new faith in the supremacy of the scriptures. Our reformers are preeminently critics of these very scriptures, and their faith goes out towards those truths, which are supposed capable of standing without the authority of an inspired writing. Their criticisms may be swept away, as trivialities which do but impede and embarrass the

public faith, or they may prepare the way for an error of philosophic schemes of deism. I do not see how they can play a part, analogous to that of the Lutheran Reformation. The faith of our reformers is substantially given to reason, and not to revelation. Ada. But all are not mere critics. Some are zealous in a new faith, and a faith drawn directly

by a more intelligent interpretation and the very same source as the most popular form of Christianity is drawn. If I see pious churchmen, building confidently on St. Paul himself of their modified views of Christianity, does it not look like the springing up of some reformed church amongst us?

I grant you that many of these critics seem to me in the position of one who stands upon a wall and uses his pickaxe to knock out the loose bricks under his feet. They cannot resist the impulse to knock out the loose bricks, though they are standing above them. But all are not of this kind. Mansfield Where do you see a nucleus or rallying point for any new church or sect amongst our advanced Christians? each seems to pick his way separately. Ada.

I think I see, such rallying point in the new interpretation given to the metaphorical language, if such it be, of St. Paul, on the subject of the atonement, a doctrine of atonement that denies the sacrifice in the old heathen meaning of the term, and at the same time accepts the mediator,

the reconciler, the restorer, gives the position within Christianity itself. both uniting very many and disuniting those from the prevailing type of Christianity. Reflect, too, how much follows from this view of the atonement. Mansfield, perhaps you are right. I venture on no prophecy. Why have not such men found what they wanted among the Unitarians? These make no way amongst us. Ada. I, for one, could not contemplate without dread the withdrawal of

divine authority from the teaching of religion. Say that the doctrine of immortality were to rest entirely on the reasonings which I or another could bring for its support. How would it fluctuate with our desires, our moods, our theories of life, even the energy with which we live our lives? It is true that this doctrine arises in the natural exercise of our reason or imagination. Even the Hebrews may not have been indebted for it, in the first instance, to a distinct miraculously authorized proclamation of it by any of their prophets. But Christ confirmed it for all time, not by his teaching only, but by the great fact of his resurrection.

This doctrine of immortality which the reason approves, which it even originates, must still be taught as from above, else it will have no steadfastly. objective reality to us. It always seemed like a creation of our own mind, which can deal with us as we please. There was a voice in the wilderness, and it cried, repent, and there followed another voice still more divine, and it said, love. And the tempest arose, the tempest of wars, invasions, revolutions, and it carried these two voices around the world. And to this moment, these divine words everywhere we echoed, repent and love repent that you may be pure

and capable of loving to grieve for our feelings and to love each other this is a teaching worthy of being called divine heaven's authority for the preeminence of the sentiment of love I think much of this

love is indeed the very passion of the reason for reason from its nature can desire only good still there are daring moods and there are daring reasons occasionally exalting hate and revenge to almost equal eminence. See how some sweet, serviceable Christian soul takes upon itself to love all the afflicted, all even the guilty.

Wherever there is sickness and distress, or crime, which is a sickness of the soul, the Christian comes, if possible to heal, always to soothe and commiserate. You will say, no, not either of you. But some stern jurisprudential moralist will say that this universal charity tends to obliterate its distinctions between virtue and vice. That it counteracts the moral opinion of society, which demands that love in kindly service be withdrawn from the criminal. But this universal love, remember, is love with tears in its eyes.

Love that will not cease to weep and protest till the guilty one has turned from his guilt, till he too can repent and can love. Nay, the Christian is the true philosopher, for shining through all his inevitable censure of the criminal, is his deep compassion that the man should be a criminal. Deep compassion, which he recognizes as a divine sentiment, which he hears in the last word God has uttered out of eternity to his suffering and bewildered creatures. To love is the great glory, the last culture, the highest happiness, to be loved, is little in comparison. Amongst our strangely complicated relationships of life, it often seems as if the loved one had all the advantage.

To him the service for him, the sacrifice. From him, perhaps, no return. You pity, some deluded mother, impoverishing herself for a reprobate son. who laughs as he spends her little hoard. Do not pity, admire rather. She is happier than a thousand reprobates. She loves. Oh, if one really existed, as I and others believe, who loved all the world and in some inexplicable way, suffered for its salvation. He was a god, at least, in his supply and happiness. Nor should I say that it was a religion of sorrow that such a a love had inaugurated. Mansfield.

Very good, my dear and eloquent Ada. And who shall say, through how many ages and through what subtle changes are formed, a scheme of theology may survive that has such a heart in the center of it? Why are you so silent, Sanford? Why do you let me and my niece have all the conversation to ourselves? Sanford. Because, as you know, I like better to listen then to talk. and also because what you were saying awoke a train of thought in my own mind.

Mansfield, you were listening then, in fact, to yourself. Take back your compliment, if a compliment you intended it, most deceptive of listeners. But what was the train of thought? Sanford, I was thinking of this antagonism between faith and doubt, and how much of our intellectual life depends upon it. No popular faith has ever existed that did not claim a supernatural origin. The idea of Revelation starts with religion itself. It is the first form in which a belief of God appears,

for in early times the God was supposed to have revealed himself personally, to have appeared at least in vision or in dream, if not in visible form, to the open eye of man. And no God was ever worshipped with the simplest rites. but those rites and ceremonies were supposed to have been, in some way, prescribed by the God himself. No ceremony ever obtained a sanction of time and numbers without being traced to the command of the God, or the God-instructed priest. In what other way was man supposed to learn what would please the divinity?

So, too, if religious precepts and doctrines were written in a book, and the book came to have authority, it would assuredly be referred to, the inspiration of some divinity, and this whether the writer of it had claimed such inspiration or not. It is thus that some of the highest products of human thought, and some of the best precepts of morality, have assumed stability and predominance, and asserted its way over the whole national mind. Like great instruments of culture, such revealed or inspired faiths have been there is no need to say. Nevertheless, it was also necessary, in order that they shall fulfill their office as well as teachers of mankind,

that an antagonistic spirit of doubt and free inquiry should coexist with them. But otherwise, the teaching by authority would become stationary or retrograde. A free inquiry has been altogether checked. The earlier period of a religion may be more pure and intellectual than the later. There may be an unchecked growth of fable. The teaching by divine authority could alone impress and unite the multitude. But this requires to be advanced, corrected, and improved by the criticism of those who think untrammeled by authority. In Europe, no faith founded on Revelation has ever been of that implicit and universal character as to reduce to utter inactivity, the inquiring reason of man.

such an ideal faith would have been a great calamity, nay, if nothing but truth were embraced under the name of a revealed faith, a faith that extinguished the highest energies of the human intellect, reducing it to the office of a passive recipient, would have been no boon, but a great disaster. In all progressive countries we see the new thoughts, which are generated both within and without a priesthood, either introducing themselves gradually,

onto the form perhaps of new interpretations, into the authorized system, or, if greater change is called for, we see what amounts to a new system growing out of the old. And all this time philosophy itself gets its force and energy, and standing room in the world by its very antagonism to some popular faith. Both parties thrive by their partial hostility or repulsion. There is no problem.

power where there is no resistance. This holds good as well than in mechanics. It holds good in the case of all philosophies. Those who speculate on the dying elephant of finally authorized teaching, on substitute for the old controversy between reason and revelation, other controversies, between systems all acknowledging themselves to be the products of reason, or of the unassisted faculties of the human mind. One, is sometimes asked, could philosophy give a faith to society, give it on her own simple authority? My answer has been, not one faith, perhaps, but many. Not perhaps, that one idea of faith which is to unite all the nations of mankind, though I too must sometimes dream of such a faith because

I too have my truth, which, being truth, claims universality. But certainly those, those various speculative creeds, whose antagonism keeps the mind strung to its utmost tension, the doctrine of immortality would, in such a state of things, be boldly canvassed and disputed, but it might also have very many earnest believers. On this great doctrine, I will venture to make one practical observation. It is not desirable that all men should believe in it, with that constant energetic faith, with which it is very desirable. some men should believe in it. If all men had the faith which transports them in imagination into some future life, the present world would lose its interest. If no class of men had such a

faith, then the world at large would lose a hope which refines it elevates the general tone of thought. You blamed me, General, for silence. You will now wish to reduce me to silence again. I am ashamed of having to live at such a lecture. Mansfield. Lecture? Nonsense. How can there be any talk if one has not, in his turn, some room to utter himself? The worst thing between us is that we accrued too nearly for animated discussion.

Yet on subjects of this nature a mark a difference of view prevents all conversation whatever. How little oral discussion there is amongst men who have once taken up their different intellectual positions. After the age of 30, I think two men have decidedly opposite views never enter into the clash of vivulchic controversy. Ada. Yet, with our vicar, who is a staunch churchman, you sometimes talk energetically enough. Conversation at least flows on without any apparent restraint. Mansfield, our vicar is one of a thousand, his cheerful temperament, his habit of society, his hybrid courtesy, the sobriety of his views, his temperate zeal, make him as delightful in private companionship as he is excellent in the pulpit, or beneficent in the parish.

But there is no controversy where he is present. There is, as you say, no feeling of restraint, because he is a cultivated man who can talk upon a thousand subjects. He belongs to a class of curgerman who, I suspect, are becoming extinct. They never were very numerous, and they are now pressed upon by the two great increasing parties, one on their right, the other on their left, the High Church or Anglo-Catholic Party, and the Evangelical or Calvinistic Party. These two sections of the church, active, enterprising, and full of doctrinal zeal, are leaving no room for that quiet section, who regarded the church, first of all, as the great instrument for promoting the virtue of piety of mankind, and who rather reposed upon their own learning, they were anxious to

make use of it for the purposes of controversy. They, in their quiet way, reconcile St. Paul and St. James, and occasionally taught their congregations at Revelation, was in fact highest reason. Reason raised one step higher than she alone would have ascended. by aid of a hand stretched out from heaven. On some topics, they adopted a discreet silence. These men, earnest, learned, tolerant, with nothing better than the general zeal for virtue and piety. I looked upon with some contempt by the present generation of churchmen. They neither satisfy the enthusiastic and elated Calvinist, nor the default and prostrate Anglican.

Sanford Even their orthodoxy is not allowed to pass unquestioned. Some of their hearers, frightened by most confused reports of German rationalism, find neology in every learned of criticism, or in reflections which have been gathered from old English divines. It is a proof how the air is charged with this kind of theological disquietude, that even in this remote village of Gravenhurst, Our quiet vicar, who never quotes anyone later than Butler or Godworth, Barrow or Balggy,

has been accused of Newfangled Doctrine, opposed to I Know Not, what articles of the Church of England? Mansfield. Indeed, I never heard of this. What is it, Ada? Ada. I have heard of nothing except that there is a gossiping party in the village led on by Mr. Graystock, who have made the discovery that our vicar is tainted with rationalism.

So runs their phraseology. It is the mere gossip of a few tea tables, and that I should not wonder if that Mr. Greystock were found writing some day to the bishop, claiming inquiry, etc. He would glory in such a deed. Mansfield, if he dares, I will have him hooded at by all the little boys in the village. I will have him drummed out of the parish. Sanford,

Put in the stocks, sent on parade, or say, on sentinel duty for six hours at a stretch. Oh, my general, the retired ironmonger. Let us hope would cover himself with ridiculed by any such application to the bishop. But if not, and if any party must take to flight, it is we who should have to beat a retreat. Mansfield, I hear the wheels. of your pony carriage, Ada.

You can take a little circuit and set down Mr. Sanford. Sanford, thank you. I prefer to walk. After thinking of subject, sections we have been discussing. I find nothing so composing or so grateful as to be alone under the stars of

night. End of section 13. Section 14 of Gravenhurst. Or thoughts are good and evil. This is a liver fox recording. All liverfox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit livervox.org. Gravenhurst or Thoughts on Golden Evil by William Henry Smith.

Conversation 5. Explanatory hints on several topics, part one. Sanford, Ada, the Vicar Calling one morning on Miss Nukem, better known to my readers by the simple name of Ada. I found our learner that. agreeable vigor, engaged in deep conversation with her. Nor did it all surprise me to discover that he had been explaining the grounds of that charge of heresy, or rationalism, which had been raised against him by some of his parishioners. With the exception of her uncle, there was not another person in a district of ten miles round who could so intelligently have

listened to his statements as Ada Nukum. The topic had been pretty well discussed before, I entered, and I mentioned it chiefly to account for the conversation which followed, and which touched on topics not off in campus during a morning call in a lady's drawing room. Amongst his other offenses, it seems that our vicar had, in one of his sermons, given a very unsatisfactory explanation of that article about church which treats of original sin. According to some of his tears. He had denied original sin altogether. According to others, he had found nothing but original sin to punish in mankind. Either way, he was pronounced to be manifestly wrong, and as he had incurred the anger of the more zealous part of his congregation, by setting his face against certain revivals,

which, an imitation of their neighbors the Welch, they had sought to introduce into gravenhurst, this and other similar offenses, which might otherwise have passed unnoticed, were not to be easily forgiven. The statement which the vicar had made on this naughty subject was something of this kind. Well, certainly, he said, no man can have sin till he has lived, till he has lived intelligently, so as to choose between obedience and disobedience. Our church, therefore, does not and cannot teach that God punishes the depraved nature of man before that depraved nature has manifested itself an actual sin of deed or thought. Original sin must first of all be sin.

But at every actual sin of deed or thought, God does punish our depraved nature because it is only a depraved nature that would choose disobedience, rather than obedience to the just laws of the Creator, whether any of his critics suggested a more intelligible statement, I cannot tell. But they agreed in complaining, that in this, they did not find their original sin, whatever that might be, and which, according to their reading of the article, ought to be discernible even to the newborn infant. Ficker.

You at least, Mr. Sanford, will think this statement sufficiently orthodox, but we shall get no help, I am afraid, from you. Our first premise, the depravity of man is, I know, the most distasteful of all tenets to the pride of you philosophers. Sanford. If the tendency to snatch it some pleasure or yield to some passion of our own, and that even in opposition to what the reason has once recognized to be a good rule of conduct. If this is a proof, a follower, depraved, corrupt nature, all I can say is that the constant is that the Constitution of human nature is a hopeless riddle and involved in utter confusion. For nothing is more plain than that. Without this conflict of motives, man could not have been a moral being at all.

Ficker, if you think this liability to sin is the very condition of a moral obedience, how do you account for God's punishment of sin, or even for man's punishment of sin, if there is any justice in it? Sanford, let us speak of human punishment first. If it springs directly from the anger we bear it to those who have inflicted an injury on us or our friends, it requires and can receive no more explanation than the original passion which led to the injury. It is passion answering passion. If we speak of it as a reflective or legislative act, it has its sole justification in the good result it produces. secures obedience to a law necessary or beneficial to the whole community. I presume it was a fuller and grander scheme of things that the passions of men should be thus kept within bonds by laws thought out by men, whether laws of the statute, book, or public opinion,

than that they should need no such restraint at all, but operate from the first in perfect social harmony. What God's punishments are in a future world, I do not decide, know whether they are of a judicial character or the consequences of already established laws, a point which is needlessly debated. But this, I will very confidently say that, whatever they are, they will be justified by their beneficent results. They were forward in some way, the happiness of created beings. Ficker. But, Mr. Sanford, and here I am on the broad and common ground of philosophy. Your explanation touches only one phase of this great matter. There is justice as well as benevolence in the character of God. It is character, as well as happiness, for which God creates us. The conscience of each man tells him that he lies open to deserve to punishment, to punishment, which has not necessarily any reference to his own happiness. or the happiness of others. No guilty man feels that he ought to be punished for the benefit that were followed from his punishment.

Enough he deserves it. Stanford, most certainly a criminal who has broken the laws of God or man, and knows that a grave penalty hangs over him, as quite enough to occupy his attention for the time, quite enough in this one association between his crime and its punishment, that this one association should take instant and full possession of his mind requires no psychological explanation. Let such a man, however, have leisure to grow calm, and let him be told that his punishment can answer no good purpose whatever, and he will be the first to explain that it is a needless cruelty to punish him,

unless, indeed, he has been brought up in abject submission to some despotic government, and has never ventured to look further than the will of his sovereign for a reason for his punishment. He would exclaim this very loudly in the case of a human punishment, perhaps in the case of a divine punishment. His tongue, and even his thoughts might be overawed. Ficker, you keep your eye fixed on the motives that would influence a jurist or legislator. I want you to dive into the recesses of a man's conscience, to fasten upon his free will and on the self-accusation that follows upon a voluntary role.

A man who is willfully broken of law feels that he is a culprit, and if you pardon him, he still feels that he is a culprit and deserves the punishment of one. Sandford, I do die, so far as I am able, into the recesses of the conscience-stricken mind. I find there is an emotion of terror that I can. cannot possibly trace to anything but some threat issued by man or supposed to be issued from God. This cannot be a feeling springing up in the solitary mind. The individual mind does not produce the threat and the emotion both. No man fears a punishment from God unless he has been taught something about that punishment, and his fear for man depends on the nature of his relation

to his fellow men. This terror of the conscience, therefore, lies in the strong association between certain acts and certain threatenings, more or less precise, nor can we be surprised at the absorbing character of the emotion, since a criminal has brought down upon himself

the penalties of the law, the hatred of his neighbors, and the apprehension of the supernatural punishment of God. Vicker, but there is also his own self-reproach, this pricking of the conscience is always accompanied by the reflection that we could and ought to have done otherwise. If it were a mere association between an act and a punishment, it would occur where the act had been performed, but where no evil or no disobedience to the law

had been intended. Sanford, there is nothing mysterious in the connection between the idea of punishment and our free will. From the nature of the case, it is an intentional act that is amenable to punishment, and this intention must be the subject of our regret. This, I presume, is your self-reproach, that anger with ourselves, which we feel when we have done what we now so earnestly which had been left undone. The law governs by means of the threat it puts forth. We must have defied this threat. We must therefore have committed an act of intentional or willful disobedience in order to be the understood subject of a penal law. If we have disobeyed the law, but not intentionally, we cannot feel that our punishment is just, or what the law prescribed, because the law was made to visit intentional disobedience only.

We have not been guilty of their disobedience, which the law was made. to punish. We are so far innocent. We should, of course, deal the apprehension of punishment, but no self-reproach. Why is an ex-post-factor law declared to be unjust? Because here the threat has been omitted. The punished man has not been governed by the law. He has been merely hanged by it. So far as he was concerned, the law was merely a vindictive act. But again, this condemnation of ex-post-factal law does not readily occur in a rude and barbarous age, which suggests to us what must be borne in mind that the sharp definitions we now make of justice are the results of experience and thought. When we promulgate a law to which we attach a penalty, we create in this

penalty a no motive of action. We resent before all men terms for a new choice. If anyone chooses his disobedience and the penalty. He can raise no objection to his own punishment, unless he objects to the law itself as one not necessary to the welfare of society. An injurious action worthfully performed is the legitimate subject of punishment, but we should deceive ourselves

if we imagined that human law could always determine the willfulness. It has to resume this from the nature of the act. Moreover, there are some cases where it is thought so necessary to enforce on all minds the terror of the penalty that the question of intentional or unintentional obedience is not allowed to be raised. If a sentinel sleeps upon his post in time of war, I believe a military authority would not accept it as an excuse that the cold, rendering him torpid, had quite disabled him from resisting, sleep. So, too, in times of religious change or disturbance, a priestly authority will not accept it as an excuse for heresy, that the heretic could not help thinking as it is. It is felt to be so necessary to associate heresy with the fear of punishment, that this question of intention is passed over. And, in fact, the association between heresy and punishment does keep many

from thinking at all in the forbidden direction. The punishment, under certain circumstances, answers its end, but the heretic himself will always feel it as an adrocious act of oppression. All who are not heretics will associate a two-fold sentiment of guilt with heresy. We'll call it an offense against God and against society. Ficker, I am glad to see that you do not dispute free will. I thought you were one of those modern philosophers who see in human history a legitimate subject for science,

which you cannot be to those who acknowledge the free will of man. Sanford, I am not sure that the freedom which man possesses through his reason is not perfectly reconcilable with correct views of science. I certainly do not dispute what is called free will. I do not dispute who could. That act of choice which united with our will or capacity for action makes it free will. I imagine we should neither of us care to go into metaphysical subtleties about this mental act of choice. Passion, habit, intellect are all blended in what we probably call a choice.

But it is really choice only so far as the intellect or judgment is concerned. Choice in the most complex affairs of life is still the development of that faculty of judgment or comparison. Perception of difference or agreement, which philosophers of all schools agree in placing amongst the original powers of the human being. Of two propositions we say, this or that may be true.

Of two proposed actions, we say, this or that may be done. The latter of these states of mind is as indisputable effect as the former, and both the intellectual act of judgment is performed, though in the latter it is more complicated with our individual susceptibilities and emotions. In the one, we have to select a truth, in the other to choose a conduct. We choose. A judgment is finally pronounced. Other or higher freedom than this, it is beyond the wit of man

to conceive. Vicker. Let metaphysicians explain it how they will, or can, that we feel we may do or leave it undone, is as certain as any fact in our existence. And this fact seems to lie at the foundation of our morality, of our praise and blame, of the different sentiments we have toward a person and a thing that has injured us. Sanford, in that last, I think you were going a little too far. The will alone, that is, the persistent power-giving rise to reiterated attempts to injure us, calling forth all the passions of a contest is sufficient to account for a vast difference in our sentiments toward persons and things that injure us. The philosopher who has been bitten by a ferocious dog and remembers the feeling of anger he had and perhaps still retains towards the brute,

will acknowledge that it is not necessary to have recourse to the free will of the moralist to explain a very great difference in the feelings we have towards a living creature that has attacked us, and a stone that has fallen upon us. We do not feel towards the dog as we feel towards a man, but neither do we feel towards the dog as we feel towards a stone. We love and hate, and praise and blame, our own fellow creatures in very many cases, where we distinctly refer to their natural tempers or their natural powers, to please or to excel. When, however, the whole man stands before us in his full character, our praise and blame will bear in a special reference to what have been his chosen motives of conduct, to habits in the formation of which his reason has conquered, to the reason, in short, of the man, as displayed in his affections and conduct.

Vicker, reverting to your rationale of divine punishment, one thing is clear. they can be ultimately no ground for God's punishment but God's disapproval of the kind of conduct punished, because if we say that he punishes for the sake of suppressing that species of conduct, still, when we ask ourselves, why is that species of conduct to be suppressed? We have no possible answer but God's disapproval of it. Sanford, God being one with supreme reason and power, I admit it points the accuracy of your observation, but there is a great difference between saying simply, I punish because I disapprove, and I punish because I disapprove, and because my punishment will suppress such conduct in future.

The disapproval of man is the ultimate ground for the punishment he inflicts, but he must clearly see that his punishment tends to suppress the conduct which he disapproves, before he allows himself to act upon his disapproval. Disapproval alone is not a ground for punishment. What we said of human punishments we must say, I presume, of such punishments as may take place in the future world, that it was a grander, fuller, loftier scheme, that man should both sin and be punished and rise through sin and punishment into conscious rectitude,

than that he should have lived in that unconscious innocence, if innocence it is to be called, which knows neither good nor evil, which neither obeys nor disobeys. A perfectly harmonized spontaneity seems a poor type of existence compared to submission to a law which man has reasoned out and struggled to obey and get obeyed. You say, well, that it is not happiness alone, but character that is the end of creation in man. but these are not in themselves distinct and conflicting ends.

It is in the creation of the good man that the highest climax of the happiness procuring principle is seen. The good character belongs to him who consciously and designantly produces happiness, who not only is raised to the highest kind of felicity himself, but who is the source of felicity to others. Happiness is produced in many other ways, and by the creation of many of the things, but nothing we know of is comparable in this respect to the high and noble character

whose creation or development we must admit is a costly proceeding. It costs much and many kinds of misery. It overpays them all. The noble character you perhaps say is not always happy. He is not every species of happiness. He may have many kinds of suffering, but his nobility of character is always a happiness. and always is he the sustainer and producer of happiness and others.

We place goodness before happiness, because in the latter we may be speaking only of enjoyment, and that not of the highest order. While in goodness, we speak of man as the source of happiness, as well as the subject of the higher kind and felicity. Man radiates happiness on man. How is it possible that he should fail to estimate his fellow being first, and chiefly by the light and heat that he gives.

Picker, I noticed that you said in passing that it was a distinction hardly worth canvassing, whether future punishments were to be considered as judicial or as natural, that is, as consequences of our conduct according to laws already established. It seems to me to be merely a metaphorical use of the term when we speak of the natural consequences of our faults, punishments. Punishment means some penalty imposed by God or man over and above these natural consequences. When we say that the drunken is punished by the ill health which is in time it occurs, we borrow a term from our judicial proceedings. The primary meaning of punishment

would be illustrated by the stocks in which the truncton was formerly placed by the hand of the constable. Then, if we talk of carrying out these natural consequences into another world, what terrible nonsense we fall into? How does the intemperance of the drunken punish him there by natural consequences? Is he too had Tullarium tremens in that other state of existence also? And as to a man's conscience, the more he has sinned, the more callousness has become. He who close out of the world with one murder on his head, carries a dire remorse with him. He who has committed half a dozen murders walks forth stolid as a block. Besides, as we know, nothing of the circumstances of the future world, so as to foretell the new relations into which we bring ourselves,

we can gain nothing whatever by calling our punishment the natural consequence of our conduct here. That natural consequence must come upon us with just the same surprise and suddenness as a judicial sentence. End of section 14. Section 15 of Gravenhurst, or thoughts on good and evil. This is a Libervox recording. All Liverwax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. Gravenhurst of Thoughts of Good and Evil by William Henry Smith. Conversation 5. Explanatory hints on several topics.

Part 2. Sanford. Very true. For that and other reasons, it does not seem to me a distinction of any importance. Punishment is the repression of crime, and I cannot easily conceive of its existence where there is no crime to be repressed. This judicial mode of repressing evil belongs to human society and springs from the nature of man. The constitution of social man, by which he erects a judicial tribunal, is as much a part of the great scheme of things as the physical organization,

according to which ill health follows upon intemperance. In a broad view of the subject, the stocks and the delirium tremens are both natural consequences, but resulting from a different set of laws or powers. Ada. But if we cannot understand how the criminal is punished in a future world through the natural consequences of his criminality, we can understand how the cultivation of piety of love to God and man will be there as here, its own exceeding great reward.

This cultivates us for heaven, but the abode of whatever spirits stand nearer than we do, to the throne of God. All the physical universe is brought together, as some astronomer writes, by the one common element of light. An in like manner, all the spiritual universe must be bound together

by the one common element of love, that love, which is also reason. Sanford, yes, yes, we have a safer basis there to proceed upon. Something of the eternally good we know, and can therefore, in some measure, cultivate ourselves for eternity. Vicker, I begin, I think, a little better to understand your point of view, Mr. Sanford, and it is well that those who reason impart from different promises

should occasionally explain themselves to each other. You consider the future life as some complement of further development of the present, in which, perhaps, all of us will, in some way, struggle forward. This is not quite the heartless philosophy you are sometimes credited with. People say of you that while you would teach us admiration of this progressive world, you would shut us up within the limits of a mundane existence, would forbid us to aspire beyond it. Sanford, I would teach that this life is worthy of our love and admiration, and that God, through our own efforts, that is, of course, through the efforts we are constituted,

to make, is still rendering it more excellent and more happy. But I have never said that the always imperfect knowledge and happiness of man would confine his aspirations within the circuit of our mortal existence. These aspirations, vague as they may be, I take to be an inextinguishable portion of our humanity. Our earth bends down to itself, our rounded sky, makes an ethereal dome for itself out of the infinite space beyond. So is with our humanity.

It browns a heaven for itself out of the infinite and the eternal, and just as we know that the sky is, and yet know that the form it takes is due to our earth. In like manner, we may know that the eternal life is, and yet feel that the form it assumes to us is necessarily due to our present humanity. It is a compliment to that humanity, is conceived by some relation to it. Ada, take away the earth and there would be no rounded sky.

Take away the sky, and earth would be like an underground clog, which is inhabited by insects. Sanford, very little, quite inappreciable, is the influence I can possibly exert on my contemporaries, and therefore whether I am faithfully represented or not is a matter of no moment. Even to myself personally, it ought to be a matter of no concern, for I lead in obscure life, under an obscure name, and have not a kindness to expect or a favor to ask of any but the few friends who already know me. It might appear like an affectation if I were very solicitous about being rightly understood, Let each one trim his lamp the best he can and see that he has some truth, by the light of which he can live and die.

To me, it seems not a truth that the moral nature of man is some hideous confusion, to be accounted for only by the combination of diabolic and divine agency. To me, it seems not a truth that the virtue or piety of some amongst us is to be carried forward to higher and higher stages of development, or the blurred and stunted piety of others, for all have some piety, all at least have some goodness in them, shall be extinguished forever if I know not,

what eternal horror. To me it seems a truth that if the present human life opens out into a wider and grander existence, the future and the present will be found to form one great hole, over every part of which the same supreme wisdom will have presided. Ada, Behold, we know not anything. I can but trust that good shall fall at last, far off,

at last to all, and every winter changed to spring. So runs my dream, but what am I? An infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a cry. you know these verses of course you do already these and others from the same poet have taken root in the minds of all cultivated englishmen they express thoughts that will never die and in language that will surely never be surpassed sandford i know them well and feel their truth and beauty let the little children that are crying for the light throw their arms around each other's neck and nestle the closer for the darkness that surrounds them so will they best subdue the terrors of the night. Vicker.

If I were disposed, as Mr. Grace-talk asserts of me, to adopt any of the heresies of the day, I think it would be that which foresees at the end of all, the consummation of the good of all. Such a hope is consistent with the spirit, if not with the letter. I cannot read it in the written letter. What is dark to me must remain dark.

What appears is sacred truth, cling to with tenfold for tenacity. Some write that the old roads are being broken up, and that men are seeking new paths. I cannot offer myself as guided the discovery of new paths. I stand, and can only stand, upon the old ones. Another age may perhaps breathe for itself, teachers of another stamp. Ada, let me strike upon a note lower down in the scale. When you and Mr. Samphib were talking of choice or free will, it occurred to me to ask whether either of you adopted that theory which asserts the original equality of all men's minds and resolves all our differences into differences of education. Vicker. If such a theory were ever seriously

put forth, I think Mr. Sanford will agree with me that it will never be put forth seriously again. But say the substance mind were all right. alike in all, that other substance, the body, on which in this life the manifestations of its consciousness, depends, is very different in different individuals, as different temperaments, and many differences of organization. Ada, I was thinking if that be the case, the act of comparison or of choice of which Mr. Sanford was speaking must be performed under different conditions in different individuals. Vickard, no doubt of it, Ada, and that, though, the variety of character to which this variety of temperament gives origin may add much to the charm of

life in its multiple various activities, yet it must prevent the attainment of a uniform standard of morality. Sanford, there are certain abstinences from evil we do right in claiming from all, we should vainly expect the same positive good, or the same kind of services from all. Vicar, that variety of character which may be traced to variety of temperament, has been a frequent subject of reflection with me. My precision of parish priest has brought it often before my notice. I am often compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst are not bad in every relation of life. I find myself growing lenient in my blame and reticent in my praise. Again and again, I say to myself that only the omniscient

can be equitable judge of human beings. So complicated are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues, as well as hidden vices of our fellow men. What would life be if we did not believe in that invisible eye that sees all, sees through the intricacies and recesses of human thought. This is something very different from the eye of my neighbor, who sees very dimly, and who, after all, is a little better than myself. We all know that there is a perfect being who knows us all. Otherwise, I think we should, by task and consent, drop all efforts after any ideal standard of perfection.

Sanford. The belief in an omniscient seems to me to grow with our science, and to be the last resting place both of the intellect and the heart. It results from the unity of this multifarious and progressive world, and it reflects back a unity of aim and purpose into our varied humanity. Never did prophecy speak more distinctly the aspirations of the human race than this, that all nations shall be gathered together in worship. are the one present and ever-present God. Ada, something like the division of labor of our political economist, appears to develop itself amongst our moralities. The growing complexity of life demands and creates the differently virtuous. Men who are admirable in private life deal often in public,

and the reverse is as often true. Vicker, I have had occasion to make the same observation, of your own sex. Here in Gravenhurst, our public characters are the charitable ladies who visit the poor, who teach in our schools, and sometimes nurse the sick. Now, these excellent people, who gladden, I am sure, many of poor men's cottage, do not always gladden their own homes. If you were an ignorant lad, or had broken your leg, one of these energetic ladies would be your good angel. But if you do not happen to want their commiseration. If you want nothing of them but the amenities of cultivated life, you are to them the most wearisome and insipid of mortals. I say this, of course, in no carving spirit, but merely to

illustrate your observation that if new duties are taken up by the female sex, there will be new specialties of character introduced. There is room for all. I grudge no honor paid to the heroines of the schoolroom in the hospital. There was a duty left unperformed, and they stick forward to fulfill it. But I will never consent for a moment to disparage the old sweet feminine character, which makes one home the abode of cheerfulness, refinement, and repose. A lamentable thing would have been for England if every unmarried woman of 30 betook herself to the poor for employment.

What the poor would gain in the long run is very doubtful, or rather, to my mind is not doubtful at all, but our higher social cultivation would lose is very evident to me. Sanford, in that close intimacy with the minds of many all-ball classes, into which you are brought, in what if how much to interest you, and that even in the most commonplace people. Vicker, no man is commonplace when you know him intimately, I should be perplexed to say who were commonplace people. choose your specimen, look through the village of Ravenhurst, and pick out your most decided specimen of the commonplace man. Now sit down before him and study him. In a very little time,

you'll find something so noteworthy in your specimen that you will throw it away and go in search of another. Another and another shall be selected and studied, and so long as you have patience to look steadfastly at your man, so long will you be on the same. satisfied that you have a genuine specimen of the commonplace before you. Sanford, I am prepared to believe it. I have felt something of the same kind in my own limited observations. Ficker, heaven is very bountiful to us. How heavy seems the burden on that man's shoulder.

What strength and patience have grown up beneath the burden. We owe all till heaven, even our virtues. I have always felt a certain timidity in dealing out the requisite censures against men who have been led into error by hot, impetuous tempers, who probably thirsted after pleasures and excitements, which to me and others were no temptations at all. If, when I was a young man at the university, I led a tranquil, temperate, and studious life, I feel that I should be something of a hypocrite, were I to claim any merit for this. Such was the only life I cared to leave. I hated noise. I've referred fresh air to breathing tobacco smoke, fresh from the mouths above the men. This alone was enough to keep me much in my own rooms. The wine party was simply detestable. The morning headache had no charms for me. Backus amongst his grapes and his satyrs may be a classic subject for art. Out of the campus he is very much of a beast. I have found men whittier, as well as wiser, when they were quite sober. Happy those to whom temperate passions have been given. I have known young men absurdly, and even hypocritically boastful of their ungovernable feelings. They, for their part, are all flame. They are all fool. What is a man worth unless he is master

of himself, unless reason and not passion is sitting at the helm? And is not temperance, the very conservator of that youth they prize so much, which perhaps, indeed, they have not yet learned to prize half enough. Sanford. Sometimes the genuine fire and turbulence of youth is but a temporary excess of energy. It will all be wanted before the day is over. Nations too, as well as individuals, have their temperaments. Here we are generally charitable enough.

We condemn a hot-headed man, a hot-headed people. we merely notice and describe. Ficker. National character is a great puzzle. We first attribute the character of the people to its institutions, and then account for its institutions by the character of the people. Sanford. When the institutions are not imposed upon them by other nations,

there must be something in the people themselves that led to their formation. For this, something in themselves, we are referred to. climate, soil, external nature, into race. Ficker, I, who do not believe in originally different races, can only explain the character of the nation by the operation of external nature and its own institutions. Sanford, I suppose that a zoologist would ultimately resolve race into climate or terrestrial position, because, say there were originally different stocks, what should make the difference of these stocks, if not some difference, known or unknown to us, in the external nature in which

they first appeared. Victor, when I was at Naples, I began by accounting for everything, by the peculiarities of the Catholic religion. Afterwards, I began to suspect that this form of Christianity was due to southern skies, to some such southern populace as I had before me. Sanford, there is always both action and reaction in these cases. What did Christianity do for Constantinople? And what to Constantinople do for Christianity?

Religion generally exalts some characteristic of the people. Rarely alters it, where it seems to have altered it, as where it seems to have introduced a Pacific instead of a warlike character. There were, in fact, other circumstances at work. What is Christianity not doing for England at this moment? It exalts and sustains all the philanthropic energies of the people. Ficker. But I am sure you will admit, Mr. Sanford,

that besides the sanction given to such virtues as society, by its own intelligence, would produce. There is an especial Christian type of character, belonging to our religion, and which dates from its great founder. The ideal may be blurred by the ignorance and passion of men, but it enters in turn every nation in the world. Sanford, most readily do I admit it. How often have I wished that there was some way to utter all the truths at once that ought to be taken into a complete survey of any of these great topics? Most readily do I admit the influence on society, and through generation after generation, of the type of character to human.

and of the many noble exemplars it has had. But it is impossible not also to admit that this very type of character becomes modified by the intelligence of the age or people that receives it as divine. A light travels to us from some distant point in the past centuries, but always it is the atmosphere about us that colors it, reveals or obscures it.

The times have been when the Christian character meant a separation from the world, with the exception of almsgiving, the ideal Christian might have passed through life wrapped in contemplation. The ideal Christian of England in the 19th century is very different. We expect to meet him on every path of philanthropic enterprise. Nay, we liken the better if in useful industry. He builds up a princely fortune for himself. If so various a country as England could put forward its model or representative man. How would you describe him? He would certainly be a Christian,

but a Christian who has a zeal for promoting all the temporal interests of society, whether it is a system of drainage or a system of education. And astonishing, indeed, it is to behold the number of charitable, municipal, national undertakings in which our representative Christian takes the lead. We do honor to his piety, but we demand that it occupy itself with the good, healthy, happy life of this to Rayquius globe. We have very little respect for the solitary raptors of saints, looking upwards into the skies, if nothing comes of it for this lower world. Such solitary raptors we rather excuse than admire. vague excitations, followed by vague depressions.

We leave them undisturbed. But not to saintship of this description does England look for its salvation. By all means with this or that gentle youth, sit apart, with books of devotion on his knees, sit there in ecstatic, hopeful, amazed condition of mind. If such to him be the best in most innocent mode of passing his existence. Innocent it is, and therefore let it be undisturbed. But England thinks it has other employment for its youth. and looks for help to another species of piety.

Ficker. Many a virtue is exclusively drawn from Christianity, which owes its existence to the normal exercise of an advancing intellect. That I can understand. On the other side, do not let us make the mistake of attributing our virtues to an intelligent public opinion, without taking into consideration the special operation of Christianity

upon that public opinion. There is very much an immorality that has no immediate connection with religion, but what moral opinion of the world, with which it is connected, has grown up under the influence of religion. A temperate man who sets a right value on his health, and who is ashamed of the disgrace of inebriety, a humane man, who shrinks even from the spectacle of suffering, an honorable man, who a blushed,

in deep at the idea of uttering a premeditated lie. These seem to need no form of religion to uphold their temperance, their humanity, their veracity, yet the public opinion in which these virtues grew up would not have been precisely what it is but for the element of religion. Sanford, granted. Ficker, I, for my part,

would be the last to undervalue the union of a general intelligence with the Christian piety. Nor has this been the tendency of the Protestant Church of England. Not, at least, of the Church of England, as I was taught to know and revere it. Not of the Church which acknowledged

amongst its leading spirits, such men as Locke and Pele and Butler. Our Church has not hitherto been ungenerous towards those of her own members, whose learning may have appeared to lead them somewhat astray. When, at a time, sometimes spent abroad, I returned to my own country. I congratulated it especially on the manner

in which its ecclesiastical affairs were settled. We had a church which did not affect to govern, but only to instruct the people, and which taught a piety that neither inflated with spiritual conceit or prostrated before the altar with the humility painful to witness. Is all this to change? Ada. Tell Mr. Sandford. some of your experiences while you were at Naples. Ficker. They illustrate nothing but what Mr. Sanford, and indeed, every intelligent person knows very well. How readily and emotional piety may associate itself, with other things not quite so estimable. I made a stay of some months in a small house in the neighborhood of Naples.

My domestics consisted of a valet, Lucchese, and a cook, Teresa. Luchessie had strongly suspected to be a rogue. I knew nothing of Teresa except that she was a bad cook, with a great reputation for sanctity. I have a small silver crucifix which I value highly as a work of art. Luchasey, too, had formed a higher appreciation, probably of its mercantile value. I missed it. He told me a long story about thieves who were known to be prowling in the neighborhood. I had my suspicions as to the manner, and Richard had disappeared.

I put no further questions to Lou Chazy, but in the evening walked quietly downstairs and looked in at the open door of the kitchen. The rogue was showing his bully to the old woman Teresa. The pious Teresa had fallen down upon her knees, alternately kissing the crucifix and congratulating their fellow servant on his valuable prize. All silver! How heavy! And then she again sobbed over the sacred image. The moment I entered the kitchen, she thrusts the crucifix into her bosom and rose from her knees. I asked for my crucifix. She swore by all the saints in heaven she had never seen it.

Sanford. How did it end? I told her that I had seen it in her hand the instant before, and hinted that if she restored it to me. Lettaci should have no questions put to him, provided he would not bring it down again, to assist her devolved. Luchasey took the crucifix from the old woman and returned it to me, protesting at the same time that I had very brightly interpreted his motives, for he only brought it down to Teresa that she might for once say her prayers to it. Sandford. Strange, if perhaps in this more enlightened country, there is many a man who kisses the crucifix to as little purpose as Teresa. Vicker. The same old woman gave me an opportunity of observing how easily miracles are multiplied in a Catholic country. In any country, in short, where a belief in miracles already prevails. She kept a pig, kept in her disorder scullery which communicated with the kitchen. Of the existence of this inmate of our establishment, I knew nothing till I heard that it was lost. The pig had strayed. Then I heard of prayers in which communicated with the kitchen. And I heard of prayers in which were, and I heard of the wax tapers offered to St. Anthony for its restoration.

Late one evening after Teresa had gone to bed, she heard the handle of the scullery door slowly turned. Starting from her couch, she saw the door open of itself, saw the pig enter, saw the door slowly close again. It was, of course, St. Anthony himself, who had brought back the pig. It so happened that, walking out that night, as I often did in the balmy nights of Italy,

I observed a pig standing at what I at once surmised to be its old familiar domicile. I turned the handle of the door and let the creature in. It was in vain that I gave Teresa this explanation. Nothing could shake her faith in the miracle. Her own account of the matter was that the devil had put it into the heart of her erotic master to give this wicked explanation in order that her faith in St. Anthony might be tried. me add that I lived long enough in the south of Italy to understand that, amidst all its superstition and trickery and self-delusion, this steals in an influence from the imitation

of the Christian character. This steals an array of light from that fixed luminary in the past ages, which is most precious, and which introduces itself, I suppose, in the only way in which, without altering the nature of humanity, it could be introduced. At least, I felt that my more rational Protestantism, with its doctrinal system, would not assimilate with this people, as they now present themselves to our contemplation. Sanford The teaching that is to affect a people must in some measure grow out of the people themselves, grow, of course, out of the better and able minds of that people. If a new element is introduced from without, it must be such as at once assimilates with the, people, or the people must modify it till it does. There is no help for this.

End of Section 15. Section 16 of Gravenhurst, or thoughts on good or evil. This is a Libravox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Gravenhurst, or thoughts on good and evil by William Henry Smith. Conversation 6. The whole is one, part one. Monsfield, Ada, Sanford. I have to report the last of our conversations that had a distinct reference to this great theme of good and evil. In this last, we traveled over so wide a field, starting from our primary conceptions of substance, power, and relation, and ending in some attempt to see the whole of this progressive scheme, of nature and humanity as the manifestation of the divine idea.

We traveled, I say, over so wide a circuit, that if we did not exhaust our topic, we appeared at least to have exhausted ourselves. After this field day, we did not again for some weeks refer to these philosophical subjects. About this time, too, the great political events which made the talk of all Europe. First, the partial liberation of Italy by the arms of France, and next, the division, not to be accomplished, it seems, without war, of the great Federal Republic of America, became also the engrossing topics of our little coterie, Gravenhurst. I am aware that certain subjects of an abstract nature are introduced here, with a brevity which may render the dialogue in some parts, rather obscure to those who are not familiar with such subjects. I do not apologize for this brevity, because it is the fault which of all others will be the most readily forgiven. But I crave some indulgence, and that it be borne in mind that, even if I had reported this conversation at greater length, or had it accompanied by explanatory notes, I must still have taxed the attention of the reader. We were assembled as before in the General's Library.

Ada, turning to me, said, You have lately, more than once, use the expression, the whole is one. Will you explain to me that precise sense in which you use it? Do you mean that one substance or being underlies and causes the whole phenomena of the universe? Or do you simply mean that the whole is one scheme or plan,

the various substances and the various properties being bound together by such relations as to form one great design. One great scheme, whose purpose let us say, is the development of man. Sanford. The last is the only sense in which I have ventured to use the expression. It was the only sense of which it was necessary to use it.

We have been often skirmishing around the old problem of the origin or the rationale of evil. And in connection with this subject I naturally referred to the unity of our great mundane scheme. But the only answer I can give to the old question, why evil exists, is that good and evil together form one entire scheme, that the whole is one,

and that the whole is good. It is an answer almost as old, perhaps, as the question itself. But it is an answer which becomes more clear and satisfactory, as science enables us to trace the connection between all parts of this wondrous whole. Modern science, and our later plays in history, had taught us that this great scheme of nature and of man is progressive.

They have taught us, moreover, that there is the same intimate or causal connection between events when they are of this progressive character as when they are periodical or cyclical. They have, therefore, enlarged our conceptions of their great whole, which, conceived as the wisdom of God, is the final resting place of the human intellect. Ada, I just now spoke of the purpose of our world, but I am not sure how far we can correctly speak of a purpose of the whole.

Sandford, we can, of course, mean only that one part is subordinate to another. In animate nature, for instance, is subordinate to the animated. We could conceive the solid earth rolling in. in space without any four-footed creature walking upon it. But the four-footed creature would be sadly at a loss without the solid earth. Nerve and artery can perform their functions well enough without our philosophical speculations. But speculative philosophers require a nervous and arterial system. The sun in heaven could very well without us.

We could not dispense with the sun. The highest thought of man cannot influence a single movement. that the astronomer has to deal with. But the facts which constitute the science of astronomy have had much to do with the development of the human mind. As we rise in this manner, higher and higher, it is the last which shows back new meaning upon the whole. We naturally call it the purpose of the rest.

Ada. That which is highest is most dependent. It is no great boast that the sun makes, that he can do without us. we not without him. Sanford. In this point of view, we may correctly say that man, are rather the full development of man,

whatever that may ultimately be, is the purpose of our great scheme. Some would prefer to say that the happiness of all living creatures is that purpose. It would be idle to seek at every part of nature, animate, as well as inanimate, a direct reference to the convenience of mankind. and the pleasure of the simplest creature has in it the character of an ultimate end.

But if it were only for the sake of gravity, I think we may be permitted to say that this progressive and heaven-directed man, so immensely superior to all of the terrestrial creatures, is the world's great purpose, that which gives significance and a reason to the whole. Ada, but if the unity of plans suffice the argument, you have come to some conclusion, you who occupy yourself so much with metaphysical inquiries upon that other unity, the unity of being. Sanford, I have always spoken of mind and manner as different substances, distinguished by their different properties. But I suppose you ask whether I should finally resolve both substances into one, or into manifestations of the one absolute being.

Like many others, I have felt the attraction of such subjects. I cannot say that I have ever rested in any quite satisfactory conclusion. Still, I must suppose that both mind and matter are, in some sense, the products of the one eternal being. Ada, a power which pauses in space some apparently independent thing, and throws off what becomes an individual separate self. Sanford is to us altogether incomprehensible. But so is all power incomprehensible. We have but to say that it is. The power which one atom exercises over another,

or seems to exercise, is one of those primary facts of which nothing can be said, then that it is. We have the idea of power, as we have the idea of substance, but all instances of it are like, startling to the reflective mind. Ada, you hold then, to the unity of being as well as to the unity of plan?

Sanford, one is oppressed by the magnitude and subtlety of these ontological problems, as they are sometimes called, problems which carry us out of the sphere of our sense-given world, and belong as much to theology as to metaphysics. I have rested in that view which seem to me, to combine the greater number of generally admitted truths, and which combined them in the most harmonious manner. I have never felt that I had attained a position free from all difficulty. A transcendent intellect.

Indeed, must that man have, or a most confident temper, who, after he has formed his philosophical system, can look at it without one feeling of distrust, without a secret suspicion, that there may be some vulnerable point, some undipped heel, upon which another hand, or his own hand at another time, may inflict a fatal wound. Mansfield, happily the confident temper is not very rare, whatever may be said of the transcendented intellect. Thus some philosophical faith is secured amongst us, sometimes the two united one man, and then we have the master by whom thousands.

can swear. Ada, but what is that view in which you have rested? Sanford, it is the opinion of many profound thinkers that they can be but one real, self-existent being in the universe. They regard created or phenomenal substance as necessarily some manifestation of the power of that being. In this manner, they partly escape the perplexity that surrounds the creation of matter,

nor have they found that this belief in the one being leads them to pantheism, or such form of pantheism as hides the creator in the creation itself, although all our creation is but the power or being of God, yet that power is not absorbed in all that is created. For not only all that now exists is presumed to be some manifestation of the power of God, but in him, past, present, and future. must also be presumed to exist in what we can only describe as thought or idea. In him the wisdom as well as the power of the whole resides. His, the reason and benevolence of the universe. In some such view as this I too would rest. Ada. But by what steps do you arrive at it?

I ask the rather because I have observed. You will pardon me a criticism, a certain incommative. consistency in the manner in which you speak of material substance and material forces. Sometimes you speak of this matter around us, and of which we ourselves are half composed, as if it were a positive reality. You are impatient with those who describe the real material substance as something standing under the extended thing. I've heard you justingly exclaim.

I stand up for the atom. yet at other times you speak of extended substance you do so at this present moment as if it might be resolved itself into a manifestation of power that apparent inconsistency admits of easy explanation if our senses give us any idea of substance at all which it is presumed they do the extended thing itself or the atom of the scientific man is that substance if, therefore, I speak of matter as substance. It is not an imaginary entity, neither God nor the atom, underlying extension, that I mean, but the extended thing itself has given me by the senses. In this point of view, I have said, in not very philosophical style, I stand up for the atom. I say that, confining ourselves to this mundane system.

it is our only conception of substance, and that what the metaphysician attempts to insert under extension, is either another extension or resolves itself into a power exerted by nothing. But I am ready to admit that the substance given us by the senses affords no satisfactory resting place to the speculative mind. And when I find that both the powers and relations attributed in the first place to material, substances, point to a supernatural origin, and give to me a being that combines the attributes both of mind and matter. Then I feel myself at liberty to carry my analysis a step further, and to resolve the atom also into some form of power of the one self-existent. Ada, your atoms, therefore, after having given us the ideas of substance and power, and of reaction, transfer all things to the supernatural being, God.

Sanford, such as the course of thought, which it seems to me the mind takes or may take. Substance, power, and relation are given us at once by the senses. That is, of course, by the judgment is called forth by the senses. I cannot think of substance without power, nor a power without those relations between substances, on which the exercise of all material power depends. Substance, power, and relation form a triad, which is present in every single thing. Four, take the single atom,

and you find that in your conception of it, all three are combined. There is power, for it resists. There is relation, for what is resistance but a relation. There is substance, for every relation. There is substance, for in every relation there must be something to be related, and in every power of something that exerts it. Although I can speak separately of these three great ideas or facts,

and reason on them with some sort of distinctness, yet in every conception given to me by the senses, they are indissolubly combined. My substance is always power as well as substance. My individual thing is always defined by its relations to other things. Mansfield. You and Ada are briefed. breathing very thin air at present. I am not active enough this evening to climb to your altitudes.

Excuse me if I drop the silk handkerchief over my eyes and doves before the firelight till you descend to some lower level. Ada, the silk handkerchief uncle by all means, but I know you will not sleep. You will hear every word we say and perhaps break out upon us when we are most beset by difficulties. Let me first ask of you, Mr. Sandford, limiting yourself for the moment of material nature, to explain to me this triad of substance, power, and relation. I have just come from the verusal of Dr. Brown's essay on cause and effect, and from some still later authorities on these subjects. I find that, according to them, the idea of power is not given by material objects, that the idea, in fact, is altogether resolvable into that of invariable succession.

Again, the same class of philosophers generally agree that extension is property, which means a power, and that our material substance is that entity, which possesses the property, or puts forth the power of extension. Thus, the idea of power is denied to me, and yet the material substance is explained as the power of extension or resistance put forth by a concealed entity. I know not how to reconcile these statements, which nevertheless are sometimes found within the covers of the same book. I sadly want enlightenment on these ideas of substance and power. Sanford, and I too, I assure you, but so far as I see my way, I certainly find.

that the ideas both of substance and of power are revealed to us in the external world. I have already said that I do not think the mind is satisfied with leaving them there. Extension is indeed a property, and as much as it is one with resistance. But how conceive of this relation of resistance without the conception at the same instant of true resistance? All of our knowledge it is said is relative, but if so, the relative, the relative implies the positive, or rather implies two positives which are related together. The two positives that resist are represented to us, inevitably is two resisting things.

To say that there is the relation of resistance, and to say that there are two resistance, is to express the same fact in different words. We call resistance by the name of extension, when we think separately of the resistance. We call extension by the name of the resistance. We call extension by the name of. resistance when we think of the relation between them. The metaphysician finds that the positive substance thus brought before him has been defined or revealed by its relation to some other substance, but he can define it in no other way.

The two extended things that have risen together into his knowledge by means of their relationship are his substance. At this stage of his knowledge, he can have no other. if he calls extension of power or property only, to what substance is he to assign this property? I know that this state of things, however satisfactory to ordinary men, is not so to the metaphysician. He is discontented with the conception which seems at once both power and substance, and we have seen that he attempts to rise above it. I simply assert that, resting in our mundane system, the extended atom,

is our material substance. Ada, let us grant the atom for the present, and proceed to the question of power. Perhaps, too, we can go back with advantage to the discussion of substance after having established distinctly our idea of power. Sandfin. Very true. And if any of these scholastic subtleties

are of much importance to the world at large, it is, above all, necessary to vindicate, our right to the idea of power. Ada, power, says Dr. Brown, is the uniform relation of antecedents and sequence, and nothing more. Nor does he allow that we gather any other idea of power

from the operations of our own mind. We have no other idea of power to carry upwards with us into theology. You know his line of argument, with which I find other and later authorities, of great repute, amongst us substantially agree. May I state it to you, for the sake of clearing my own lords. If we see two events, one following the other, we remember them in that succession, or we associate

them together in that order. There is no necessity even to call in the aid of long habit. One instance may be sufficient to establish this link of association. It is simply an affair of memory. One of these events is seen and the others immediately expected. But events, so far as they strike our senses, do not all follow any uniform succession. Some do, and some do not. We contrast these two classes of events. We call the last accidental. We give the title of cause and effect to the former. Sanford, you are proceeding, I observed very cautiously. Ada. It is common to say that the uniformity of succession which distinguishes one of these classes depends on the nature of the things, on certain powers, properties, potentialities they possess. It is the nature of the thing to act so and so.

It has such a power. Dr. Brown contends that all such phrases merely express the one fact that our antecedents being present, our absurd consequence, will find, follow. They express nothing but this association we have formed. Events in the order are all the knowledge we have. We cannot explain that order by appealing to the nature or power of the thing, but the nature or power of the thing what analyzed is but a knowledge of this order. I have, for instance, two balls before me, an Indian rubber ball and one of moist clay. My senses have already may be aware of certain differences between them. I throw one of these balls down upon the floor, and it rebounds.

I throw the other on the same floor, and it adheres. I associate these different results with the differences already observed between the two balls. Whenever I see balls again resembling these, I expect the same differences in their behavior. This is the whole amount of my knowledge. I give the name elasticity to the property or power of rebounding. But what do I express by this property or property of rebounding? power, but the simple fact that one ball rebounds, while another ball does not. If I attempt to explain the different results by saying that is in the nature of one ball

to act in one manner and the nature of the other ball to act in another manner, I am only, under the disguise of different modes of expression, giving my own experience as an explanation of that experience. If I should further say that elasticity is due to a certain arrangement of the particles of which the rebounding ball is composed, I should still have only to associate the rebound with this arrangement of the particles. I am still as far as ever from any other conception of power, which is indeed, but a convenient name for that invariable succession, on which all our knowledge, practical as well as scientific, depends. The reasoning appears correct, and yet to my mind it fails to carry conviction.

Is there any covert sophistry in it, or must I, admitting its accuracy, have recourse in order to retain my old original idea of power, to some transcendental or a prior re-faith of the reason, of a reason which is defiant of experience, or of the understanding, judging, according to sense? End of Section 16. Section 17 of Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil. This is a Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit Livervox.org. Ravenhurst, or Thoughts of Good and Evil, by William Henry Smith. Conversation 6. The Whole is 1. Part 2. sanford i hope not philosophers may be justified in introducing higher or other sources of knowledge than experience or the judgments founded on experience but the first condition they are bound to observe is that they bring no conflict between the faculties of the human mind otherwise all test of truth is gone for the harmony of our ideas is the ultimate test of truth we should simply divide men into partisans of the reason and partisans of the understanding and these two sections would have no common ground of argument i prefer in this case to look steadily at the objective realities about us and the kind of judgments which all men agree we inevitably form i find something more than the relation of succession take your illustration of the two balls if two balls are a

recognized as different, I brought alternately into relationship with the same floor, and behave differently. I must associate this difference of behavior with the differences between the two balls, and although this association is coupled with one of succession, or order in time, it is something more. It is a direct association between the difference in the two balls and the difference of the event. But it so happens that we have Modern science teaches us to look for this exercise of power. There is no succession of events, but two synchronous events. In the case of two mutually attracting or mutually repelling particles,

there is nothing left for the mind to seize hold of, but some relation between the particles themselves. Our idea of power, therefore, whatever else may become of it, cannot here be resolved into the uniform relation of antecedents and sequence. All the phenomena of nonsensitive matter have been resolved into various kinds of attraction and repulsion, and polarity, which is a form of attraction or repulsion. Whether this great generalization be correct or not does not concern us. If only it is admitted that mutual attraction and repulsion are revealing forms of the activity of matter. Now, if two

particles mutually attract each other. We have two synchronous events. We have two particles starting at once towards each other. What is it we have here, if not some relation between the particles themselves? Ada. May it not be said that the only result of this introduction of the two synchronous events is somewhat to modify the language of Dr. Brown? We have what to say, the two particles of matter are being placed in a given position, these two events follow. Sanford, that would give us a definite fixed position as the cause, or invariable antecedent, of change of position, which would hardly do. And the chemist would exclaim that the same position in space is followed by very different

results, according to the difference of the particles. Here is an elementary book of chemistry lying open before us. take the first experiment detailed in it. In Merce, says the book, a piece of iron in a solution of copper, and a deposit of copper takes place on the iron. For every particle of copper deposited on the iron, an equivalent part of iron left its place.

It seems then that amongst the molecules of the metal and other solution that was set up this two-fold action with these two synchronous movements. neither movement can be said to be the cause or the antecedent of the other. The only antecedent Dr. Brown could supply us with is that a position, but if the vessel here were filled with another solution, they would be the same position, yet not these movements. How avoid the inference that the difference of the result is due to the difference of the particles themselves?

The power of the particles, their activity, and their action upon each other, may be very obscure ideas, but they obstinately resist all analysis. Ada, but still we can form no idea of the acting of one particle on another. How it draws it to itself. Whatever chemical elements are employed, we can only say those elements in that position move together. How suppose when particle acting on another through empty space? And then, both particles must act before, they move. They must have that power which Aristotle, I am told, ascribe to God, of causing motion

without himself moving. For the movement of each particle depends on the presence of the other, not on the movement of the other. Sandford, whether we ought to conceive one particle acting upon another, and so each particle inert, so far as it is acted on, and active so far as it acts on another, or whether we are to drop the idea of inertness or passivity, and to conceive a general activity of the particles of matter, which move together if they move at all. I leave to others to determine. All I am concerned to maintain is that external nature gives us this idea of power. What is this activity everywhere around us by power? What, as I read it, It is the influence which matter exerts on matter in controlling or initiating this activity, but power.

It is quite a mistake to ask how matter attracts or repels, if attraction and repulsion are the simplest swarms of material activity. Suppose we conjured up some ether between the two particles. We should have the same perplexity transferred to the particles of this ether. when we are compelled to say there is a direct relation between particles themselves determining their activity. We must describe this as a religion of power. Whether the power ultimately belongs to the particles themselves is another question. Ada, there is a point of view you have not discussed. Some derive our idea of power from the consciousness of our own activity

and assert that we do but transfer in a metaphorical matter. our own sense of power to inanimate things. Sanford. It is a common trick at the imagination to infuse our human feelings into inanimate nature, and something of the kind takes place here. But that which we call sense of effort or consciousness of power is made of partly of certain muscular sensations peculiar to the sentient being, and partly of the very idea of power we are canvassing. The resistance which another thing offers to me, and the knowledge that the movement of my arm overcomes that resistance, gives together their meaning and significance to certain sensations which accompany that movement. I press my hand upon this flexible cane. It bends, and it returns my pressure. I recognize the antagonist force in the cane quite as distinctly as I recognize my muscular force, and unless I choose to play with my imagination, I do not.

not infuse any degree of consciousness into the gain. Ada. Scientific men write freely enough of force, which I presume differs only from the metaphysician's power in this, that it is limited to the power of material objects. Sanford. Some scientific men have a manner of speaking of forces if it meant by it, a separate entity, which moved an inward matter. but the greater number, I believe, would agree in defining it as the activity of matter itself

and the influence of matter on matter if these two are separable. You said that we should obtain a clearer idea of the atom when we had defined our notion of power or force, and it is certain that the conceptions which science teaches us to form favor the reality of the atom, attraction and repulsion necessarily suggests the idea that they are the properties of some unit. The old puzzle of the infinite divisibility of matter threatened to annihilate our atom, though the answer was always open, that the ability to conceive division was not tantamount to the actual possibility of division. But now it may be argued that, if in practice we never reached to the ultimate units,

yet in every conception of a solid we implied their existence, for every perceptible solid is formed by the attraction of cohesion, and this attraction must be supposed to be exerted by some unit. Footnote, these subtleties about matter and force, and indeed, many other subtle questions have been lately discussed in a very masterly manner by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his first principles, a word now, course of publication, end a footnote. Ada, I should have many more questions to ask, both about substance and power,

but I wish you to complete the account of your triad by saying something of relation. Sanford, the fundamental fact to be noticed here is that we must start with certain established relations or coexistences, without which our substances and powers avail of nothing, or form their chaos if chaos is an intelligible conception. These primary relations, from which others are evolved, cannot be due to the atoms themselves, nor to their forces, because the forces we see exercise depend on them. Such forces in their exercise may produce new relations, but go back as far as we will in imagination. We have established relations or coexistences as a fundamental

fact, as much so as the existence of substances and their powers. Now, of these religions, we might be content to say that they are, just as we might be content to say of substance and power, they are, and we might accept our triad as our final conception, dim and confused as it is. In some respects appears, if it would not for the necessity we lie under of connecting the primary co-existences, whatever they may have been, with all the relations that have followed or will follow. This inclusion of a future and a present can be conceived by us only as an idea or thought. Ada, is not this substantially the argument from design? Sanford, yes, the argument from design may be stated in a manner to render a distasteful to a philosophic mind. But if we had

attempt to embrace the whole as it develops in time. If we take notice that the earliest coexistences in which our planetary system commenced, have a clear connection with the latest developments of the human species, if we look at past, present, and future as one, I am unable to perceive how we can represent this whole inaugurated from the very commencement, except as an idea or thought, which thought implies an answerable being. Ada, I perceive your drift, having referred the primary relations, one member of your triad, to this intellectual being, those mysterious powers which were attributed to matter,

and which are inextricably complicated with relations, find a being to whom they can be more fitly assigned, and that material substance, which always had an ambiguous issue, can now be permitted to surrender its assumed character of self-existence. Our triad resolves itself into a realized idea, into the power and wisdom of God. There is one being whose power and wisdom manifests themselves in what we call creation. Mansfield, throwing off this whole handkerchief.

Oh, what avails all this subtlety! Not one step near does it carry us to the utterly inexplicable. which at the same time is the altogether unquestionable. Created substance is not a jot more perplexing than such manifestation of power, as is tantamon to created substance. On one hand, we have our material world inhabited by living, thinking beings. On the other hand, we are irresistibly led to the conception of an eternal reason, and absolute power as author of all this world.

But no wit of man can think a passage back from one to the other. We travel from the world to God. We cannot retrace our steps and travel back from God to the world. And what wonder? It is not a man whom we have projected into eternity. It is a being framed in our conception, by contrast as well as similarity. The fluctuating had suggested the permanent, the relative, the absolute.

We accept these great ideas, but we can make no use of them in a way of reasoning. We can use them only for worship, which is perhaps the greatest of all utilities. We cannot trace our way back from the permanent to the fluctuating, from the absolute to the relative, from the one to the many. Let us believe, frankly, and entirely in our own world of matter, and spirit, perhaps of many kinds of matter and of spirit. What if there be 50 or 500 substances? The great unity of design or plan is still the only unity that concerns us. We are, and this world is, and there is a great God above.

I believe in nature, man, and God, but the highest of these alone knows the mysterious bond that makes the three to be one. discourse to us, Sanford, of this unity of plan, so far at least as humanity is concerned in it, but no one disputes the harmony of the inanimate creation. There is no devil, as I have heard you say, in a Bridgewater treatise. It is only in ourselves, in our own antagonistic elements of good and evil, that we find discord and confusion. Trace for us how the passions of love and hate,

of hope and fear, bind men together, and stir them to action and lead to laws in government, morality and religion, show us how knowledge grows by very means of error, convince us that there is a law of development in the human species, which we have only to comprehend in order to admire. Ada, but before either of you launch upon this more open sea, explain me this. We talk of the immutability of the laws of nature, and in the same breath, we talk of progress and development. How would these to be reconciled?

Sanford. I should be very slow to use the expression, imutability of the laws of nature, recognizing as I do, an author of those laws. But there is no inconsistency between immutable or constant laws and progressive development. If we understand by laws the properties or powers with which substances are endowed, new relations may be brought about between these substances by the very operation of their powers, and those new relations may give new scope to those powers, developing what had been hitherto to us, potentialities only. If from the action of a volcano, or even of a mountain stream,

some new material is spread over the surface of the valley, new chemical combinations will take place, and yet no one would say that a new chemistry was created. At the bottom of the sea, innumerable small shells are deposited, which, by some change in the bed of the ocean, become afterwards a portion of the dry land. Such events probably influenced the growth of plants, yet we should not say that any new law of growth had been introduced. We see by such instances that science does not enable us to predict progress. Any progress has been made, we can observe that it was in strict accordance with established laws.

And so it is with human history. We cannot here predict the future, because man is progressive, and some new exercise of his old powers is constantly occurring. But when the novelty has occurred, and we look back upon the past, we trace, or attempt to trace, a scientific connection between all the events.

We find that all is due to the powers of man in nature, and the relations originally established between them. But I do not pretend to say that all progress in creation follows this type. No properties themselves may be introduced. The laws of human psychology must have come in with man. Mansfield. Our scientific people, forgive my presumption from saying so. talk a great deal of nonsense on the same topic of force.

A very evil man writes a treatise on the correlation of forces, and forthwith there are, I know, not how many parodies upon it. One writes that, if he waves his hand in the air, he is author of a movement that gives rise to another movement, and that to another in eternal succession. The vibrations in the air become vibrations of heat in the chairs and tables about him. and become electrical movements in the earth, in the clouds, and so on eternally. I suppose he is not the only man who waves his hand in the air,

and the vibration he sets up may somewhere, and come to other vibrations and become neutralized. If there are incessant disturbances of equilibrium, there are also incessant restorations of equilibrium. Another, altogether adverse to this indefinite multiplication of movements, proclaims that there is always exactly the same amount of wars in the world. What can he mean? Every increase in the population of England, every additional mill built in Lancashire,

is a palpable contradiction to his theory. Our regions in America and Australia have been peopled, stocked, planted, cultivated, has all this added nothing to the sum of existing forces? Sanford. The supposition is that every force is the equivalent, of some preceding force, and this suggests the idea of the same amount of force being, as it were, in perpetual circulation. But the doctrine, even if it were established, of equivalence of force, does not lead to this conclusion, because the operation of these forces may produce new arrangements of matter,

all into which a greater number of these equivalents may be introduced within the circle. Every relation of coexistence is brought about by some preceding force. But the next force to be displayed seems to depend upon this relation. Thus change and augmentation are consistent with the idea of the fixed properties of matter. Or, in other words, do not require us to conceive of any break in what we call the chain of cause and effect. Mansfield. Then another in high fantastic strain. tells me that the heat which burning coal generates in the concerned force of the sun,

as he shown millions of years ago, and talks to me a force as if it was something bottled up in the celerage. The vegetation of which the coal is composed grew, of course, under the influence of the sun, but these present particles of burning coal act as much by their own inherent properties as the sun itself, given the requisite relation, and surely the force is always worth coming, it seems to be the tendency of modern speculation to regard the world, or say, our planetary system, as containing within itself from the commencement the requisite powers for all the developments that have ensued.

I find more difficulty in seizing upon this idea than upon the older conception are successive actions of creative power. Sanford. The last seems the more facile conception. The truth, which to me appears as grand as it is simple and conspicuous, is this. Look when and where we will. There is an organized whole, and that the development takes place

is such that the past repairs the present and the present of future. Thus, whichever are these conceptions we adopt, The evolutions in time can present themselves to us only as an idea. Let me add that we, in our brief historic period, are unable to point to any event which does not seem the result are the powers with which nature and man have been endowed. Mansfield, and that I should agree with you. I cannot make man out of the monkey, or the monkey out of the monad.

But one generation of men grows out of another. and each generation in some respect improves upon or changes from its predecessor even in the act of living for the mind of man is in its nature inventive and builds thought on thought and deed on deed we cannot tell where or when one thought will lead to another or what the new thought will affect but we know that all our thinking in according to psychological laws and that the results of our thinking will again become conditions of still further thought. When we speak of science in reference to human beings, very many people imagine that we want to degrade human beings into mere machines. The properties of a man and the properties of a steam engine are something very different. There are other laws, the laws of inanimate things. Our men and women are not like the figures of a Dutch clock, moved by the mechanism of the clock itself. They are living creatures.

having within themselves their own powers of movement, which, however, to carry out our metaphor, are not without necessary relations to the mechanism below. End of Section 17. Section 18 of Gravenhurst, or thoughts are good and evil. This is a Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,

please visit liverbox.org. Gravenhurst, or Thoughts of Good and Eva, by William Henry Smith. Conversation 6. The Whole is 1, Part 3. Ada. Our progress and knowledge most men seem willing to look upon as a proper subject for scientific investigation.

And Aristotle Lennon-Nooten think, as you say, according to the same psychological laws, as the simplest to those who benefit by their teaching. All the knowledge of a Greek could not have taught him to predict an Aristotle. But we who study an Aristotle know that he could have appeared only in Greece, only when and where he did. What physical science will do for us in the future, no one can foretell. But no one doubts that the passage from the known to the unknown

will be affected by the same intellectual action as here to fore. The intellect, if we have skill enough for the task, lies open to scientific investigation. But the will? Is there not something he a witch, from its very nature, refuses to enter into our scientific survey, even when we are limiting ourselves to the past? Sanford. Yet it is precisely an actor the intellect which constitutes that free will or choice about which so much difficulty is raised,

I cannot tell how a man will act, cannot tell how a man will think. But if I can say that the powers and previous knowledge of the man determine his thought, I must say the same of his actions, wherever they are the results of free will or deliberate choice. Mansfield, we cannot often predict what, under novel circumstances we ourselves will do,

but the persuasion is universal. When we look back upon our deeds, that if the same circumstances could return to us and find us exactly in the same mood, with exactly the same knowledge, we should do the same deed again. But in general, when we look back, we mix our present knowledge with our past and think how we should act if the same circumstances in our present knowledge could be brought together. But Analyza described the will how we please. nothing is more plain than the grand harmony that exists between the living creature and the inanimate world, on which he moves hither and thither, with sense of power and faculty of choice. We can contemplate the spectacle, free from all embarrassment, when we limit ourselves to the lower animals, what a scene lies open before us, or multiplied individualities, and all finding scope for the impulses.

Here, too, we can look with philosophic tranquility on pain as well as pleasure, on all kinds of passion. See how the search for food, how the art or the strife to obtain it, how the combat and the assassination, fill the whole arena of animal existence with movement and intensest feeling and pride and energy. Repose, too, is not wanting. All hurts graze peacefully, or not more startled by apprehension. of danger than is necessary to call forth the quick eye, the quick ear, and to make them enjoyed by contrast their peaceful feeding. I like to bring before me the life, say of our crafty flocks, what conscious activity,

with a compact individuality, what persistence, what purpose. For, indeed, our fox is not without a purpose, and a certain judgment of means to end. There is booty near at hand, the country of the country. man will tell you that an old fox prefers to evade the more distant hen-roost. Suspicion is less likely to fall upon him. In him, not incumbent

by moral considerations, you cannot but admire the address in sagacity that he brings to fear upon this grand question of supply of food, and generally upon his own self-preservation. I grant you that to some dainty

hen, snatched from her perch, and carried off the black knight in Erebus, the conduct of the fox must appear simply diabolic. We, unless indeed, the hen should be our own private property, willingly sacrifice her to the general energies of the animal kingdom. Ada. But, as you say, the fox has no morality. It costs me an effort, but I can make the effort to look upon such acts of assassination as part of a beneficent scheme. But the human assassin's assassination. Mansfield, you see, we have a horror of it. We make laws against it. We rise, banded together by our human sympathies, against the assassin. The combat, the violent death,

and possessions snatched from us by brute force. You see, they have awakened in man forethought, and laws and polity, and moral obligations. But man, you say, is endowed with reason, or did not his reason at once prevent the incursion into human life of these brute actions. Look closer what you mean by reason. It is a faculty which must have its two objects on which it is to be exercised, and by which it must be developed. The human reason we are conscious of could not have been developed without aid of these materials that our life holds in common with the animal.

We rise, we take our first step upward, by putting our first step upward, by putting our foot upon the brute within us. How like a dream reads the history of man. Priest, kings, conquest, factions. What an improblio it all seems. Yet historians are every year, with more and more distinctness, showing that there was some method in all their apparent madness.

Society grows as heroes, and then worships them, and strange are the heroes it sometimes has need of. The good and the true that were in them were mingled with wild errors and fantastic sentiments. Such combinations were precisely with the world at that age produced and what the world at that age wanted. Sanford. A large portion of the history of mankind would be written by one who should faithfully describe our various kinds of heroes or progressive men.

Sometimes the political or religious hero of the day is little more than the flag of stand in which the crowd carried before. them. They need this symbol for their own organization. He who perhaps originated the movement was a solitary thinker who lived and died in oblivion. Perhaps many of such thinkers lived and wrought, knowing nothing of the precise influence they would ultimately exercise. A third class, both roused the strife and hit the combatants. Ada, the greatest of men seemed to be matured in solitude. there alone those thoughts could expand and freely shape themselves, which they had indeed carried with them, into the desert out of some contemporary society.

Sanford, the prophet is such solitary thinker taken, him and his dream together, out of his solitude, and placed at the head of multitudes. He had dreams still, the wisest of mankind, he is still half-blinded by the vision of his solitude, he is a rule of one moment perhaps a marked the next men have lived whose voice has been heard from age to age and has spread from nation to nameship mansfield and your voice in mind will hardly extend to our next-door neighbor and will not influence him no wonder that some men are as gods to us sandford not only have such men animated all people with one spirit but they have united nation to nation in some kind of brotherhood. Only through the heaven descended does the morality of the wise rule over the

less wise, and no nation has ever received the higher morality of another nation, except through one who became the prophet of both. Mansfield, study history free from the spirit of satirist and the supernaturalist, and how grand a subject it becomes. The history of all nations should, if possible, be bred together. They throw light on each. other and on our common humanity. Nor should a study of the individual consciousness and the laws of thought and passion be neglected, but we must recognize in ourselves some germ, some trace of all we read of, or we shall not understand it.

In the study of history, our own little individuality spreads, defines, exalts itself, till it fills the whole earth, sits on every throne, and kneels at every shrine. sandford you said a moment ago justingly of course discourse to us of this of that but what volumes must be filled by one who should attempt to trace the development of humanity trace our truth through error how virtue through crime have been struggling into light one thing we may say and sufficient of the drama of life has been revealed to justify his inviourable predictions of the future of humanity Well, can we help looking at the past, not only by the light of the present, but by the light of these predictions? For me, I feel that I have no standing place unless I have a right to assert that the purposes of God are benevolent for man, and that these benevolent purposes have been unfolding through the course of ages, that while no generation has been forgotten or uncared for, yet that generation, wiser and happier, are to follow.

I rest in this relation of creature to a benevolent creator. Humanity reveals enough of joy and of goodness to give me faith in God, and this faith in God reacts upon my hopes of humanity. Ada. Mr. Sandler tells us that evil is necessary to good, but it tells us that evil diminishes with our progress. In some cases, I suppose, we learn to do without it, as, for instance, drills may be. be dispensed with, when men have learned, in part by the instrumentality of jails, to respect each other's

property. And in other cases, the evil may modify its nature. But evil of some kind there must always be. Is it to be always diminishing? If so, we have something like the problem of the infinite divisibility of matter before us. We have an infinite divisibility of evil. Are we to arrive at some stationary state, but we are often told that a condition not progressive is sure to be retrograde, must we go back to the notion of the antique world and say that when the limit of possible perfection is attained, there comes an end of some kind and a new commencement. Sanford ends in commencements and not within the scope of human science. We can never tell what was the lowest stage in which man has existed, or whether all the races of men have started from the

same point. Still less can we tell what will be the last and complete development of man. These are questions for which, certainly, I have no answer, but I think it's very important to get together what plain truths we can on the subject of good and evil. If they do not shed their light far down the vister of the past, or far into the vester of the future, They will at least shield us from some hurtful errors, and perhaps from some unhappy superstitions. I think it well to see that it is by overcoming evil, as well as moral evil as natural evil, that we rise in the scale of creation. This very fact convinces us that evil was not brought here otherwise than beneficently,

is in fact part of the scheme of a benevolent creator. This may aid us, too. in supporting manfully the unavoidable, and in combating manfully all remediable evils. He who seeks truth and love's goodness has God upon his side. I think it well to see that the higher needed the lower, that we may learn to respect the whole of our humanity. Even that which we have learned to dispense with

may have been a necessary help to our present elevation. I think it well to see that human society becomes the mold, for the individual man, born into it, and to see also how this mold itself becomes improved by the stronger minds which can advance upon the education they have received. Such truths as these enlighten each man on the debt and on the duty he owes to society. They also show humanity as a whole, standing in the presence of a beneficent creator, but one whose loving execs our effort, our endurance, under whom pain and terror oftimes, do the offices of love. Ada, how shall we reconcile the faith in this terrestrial advancement,

generation standing upon generation, with the doctrine of immortality, the advancement of each individual soul in eternal life? Sanford, presuming that other objections have not shaken our faith in immortality, I am confident it will not be lost to us by our faith in progress or by any actual progress attainable on earth. It is the very nature of our progress in one direction to lead us to higher aspirations that Earth can gratify. Mansfield, death will be always with us and the loss of those we love. There will be spirits always to beckon us onwards to another life. God will be ever with us, and when man has seen,

to fear his fellow man. He will dare to think nobly and rationally of God. Some of our religious conceptions will change, nor will the change perhaps we all gain. Our age may be surpassed in many respects by succeeding ages, but if so, it will be also looked back upon with some tender regrets. Some, but not the wisest of our posterity, will wish they had lived in these times, which many of us misname is faithless and sorted. Ada, it is my faith that God will raise all his intelligent preachers, finally to the knowledge and love of himself. This, and nothing less than this, can I accept as the end and purpose of creation. I must be permitted to think that the distresses of human life have, in part at least, the explanation in this, that they carry the

mind onward to another world. After all our generalizations, life is sad to many of us. Glorious things there are in heaven and in earth, but what says are proleties, two little tears suffice to hide them all. And age after age, men have consoled themselves in each other by the hope of some compensating happiness year after. Sanford, it is a natural sentiment and I have no wish to interview with it. I would only remark that sooner or later, we must adopt the principle that good and evil formed together a whole that is good. For, say we were compensated in another world for our miseries than this. We might still ask ourselves why we were not happy in both worlds, and our only rational answer must be that the misery of one world was in some manner

necessary to the happiness of the other, that the two together made one big, and the two together made one beneficent whole. Mansfield. A world where happiness is meted out according to virtues we have practiced, according to trials we have sustained. Strikes me as a somewhat childish conception.

A world where it is meted out according to the active virtues we are displaying as a higher scheme, and such a world is also our own at this present moment. Preparation for another life. The idea is grand, non-grander, if you have a high and large meaning for this preparation, if every beneficent activity, if every noble joy, if every exalted sentiment, is your preparation for eternity.

The end of a thousand lives is just this. To live under God, our highest life, to develop all our capacities for knowledge, happiness, goodness. Preparation for another world in this sense. cannot be separated from progress or from happiness in this. It is identical with our highest enjoyment of life, with our noblest efforts to advance. One word on a theme we have sometimes agitated, the union of justice and benevolence.

I cannot conceive them separate in God or man. They are essentially one. If human beings were a ways to be made happy by simply drinking at some stream flowing with milk and honey. All that would be wanted would be to make the stream broad and deep enough and see that there was standing room for each. But man's happiness depends, first of all, upon his relations to his fellow man.

It is the good character, which stands out evidently as the great creation in humanity itself. Cease to love the good man, cease to hate the bad man, and everything on earth goes to record. and ruin, and everything in heaven, too, so far as I dare think of heaven. So long as the contrast between good and evil and doors, and without that contrast, there is no moral goodness. So long must the highest benevolence represent itself under the form

of justice. There may be intellectual beings, angels of spirits, framed on a quite different type for man, I can readily believe it, though, of course, I can form no conception of such beings. God may create beings, all of whom are perfectly good, beings who may have never heard or dreamt them evil. But goodness with such a race must have a different meaning than it has with us, nor can't such a race have our sentiment of justice. Standing in my humanity, I see justice as the necessary form of the highest benevolence. It is the necessary means for the highest production, the good character. God on earth educates his own creatures to exercise justice upon each other, whether by formal tribunals or the great tribunal of public opinion. What the method of his justice may be

in other worlds, I have no knowledge. But it is clear as light that I cannot carry up my conception of moral goodness, as formed by the contrast between good and evil, into any region of the universe, without finding there also, in some shape or other, the justice of God. Sanford. Meanwhile, in our terrestrial humanity, we see a complicated but harmonious scheme, with pain and pleasure, love and hate, praise and blame, reward and punishment, play their several parts in producing so far as they are produced, the happy life and the good character.

Our sentiment of justice is part of this great scheme which we attribute, as a whole, to a benevolent author. How natural it was in the earliest stages of human speculation, on the dark and the bright side, both of nature and of human nature, stood out an apparent contradiction. How natural it was to assign the darkness and the evil to one, one paler, the brightness and the goodness to another. We, who know that darkness and light together, make vision, that pain and pleasure together make life, cannot so break up the unity of our world. In a system of polytheism, with the gods and goddesses took their several shares of mingled good and evil, no necessity was felt for the conception of a spirit purely malicious. What men condemned,

as well as what they admired, was already distributed among such deities as a Venus or a Mars, and in a rude monotheism, where there was no repugnance to attribute to God, the angry or terrible passions of men. The want would not be felt of such a conception as that of an evil spirit of a creative or governing order. It would not jarred with the religious sentiment to Abrian God,

as author of both good and evil. Even if evil were thought to originate from some corresponding passion. But as monotheism we find, and no such evil passion could be attributed to God, what explanation offered itself in an unscientific age, but to imagine some other being to whom such evil purposes or passions could be assigned. A manichaeism of some form has therefore very extensively prevailed, Amongst the ancient Persians, the one god seems to have retired from the scene, merely acting as ultimate umpired between Oramanus and Ormwoods.

Amongst the Jews, who, if they borrowed here from the Persians, modified the idea to their own intellectual wants. The eternal god never thus retired behind creation. He retained all that was good and great in his own bright hand, and the evil spirit acts with them but a poor, subordinate part, being in fact but a vague and temporary expedient for explaining what seemed incongruous with their lofty and advancing conceptions of God. We, constrained by science, or a scientific method of thought, to see the whole is one scheme, gather our idea of the character of God from the whole, from the tendency or manifest design of the whole. and if we say benevolent power projected this entire scheme,

we cannot go back to find a separate cause for any part of it. We have a two conceptions, the world as a whole, and God as its author. End of Section 18. End of Gravenhurst, or thoughts of good and evil, by William Henry Smith.