Neither do I propose on this occasion to allude to the astounding number of resolutions which I make on the first day of the year and break regularly before I reach the second week of January. If I have one faculty better developed than another, it is that of making and breaking resolutions. Didn't I firmly resolve the first of last January that I would be very temperate in the use of the King's English for the space of three hundred and sixty-five days? And when two hours later I slipped down on the sidewalk, and in the operation sat down on my new hat and looked up to see a thoughtless young man laughing at me, didn't I break that resolution and address some remarks to that thoughtless young man which were rather more emphatic than elegant?
I fancy I did.
Equally when I was a little boy did I not resolve one New Year's Day that I would keep the whole Ten Commandments, and was I not caught in the preserve closet the same day and subjected to a degree of corporal punishment which made me break nearly all the rest of them before night?
I never saw but one person who succeeded in keeping a New Year's resolution, and he had pined away so rapidly in his physical and grown so abnormally in his moral man, that it was really painful to look at him. He was the nearest approach to an angel on half rations I ever expect to see. A good meal would have made him sick, but I really believe he would have bolted at one gulp the entire nine tons of tracts which some New York individual has kindly forwarded to the Young Men's Christian Association.
I cannot but admire the theological cheek of this man. His brass is of no ordinary description. It is sonorous, stately, magnificent. Nine tons of tracts! Twenty thousand one hundred and sixty pounds of appeal to the ungodly! Three hundred and twenty-two thousand five hundred and sixty ounces of the essence of doctrine! About thirty miles of grace!
December 28, 1867.
