Compensation

THE OLD MANSE—CONCORD
BEING AN ESSAY AS WRITTEN BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
DONE INTO A PRINTED BOOK BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THE SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, U.S.A. MCMIV
Copyright, 1903, by The Roycrofters, East Aurora, N. Y.
In this God’s world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice? I tell thee again there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the true thing.— Thomas Carlyle.
Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation; for it had seemed to me when very young that on this subject Life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents, too, from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the dwelling-house; the greetings, the relations, the debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared moreover that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that would not suffer us to lose our way.
I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life. No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up they separated without remark on the sermon.