Here is your nursery story,—very brief, and in some sort unsatisfactory; not altogether intelligible, (I don’t know anything very good that is,) nor wholly indisputable, (I don’t know anything ever spoken usefully [[227]]on so wide a subject that is); but substantially vital and sufficient. So the good human work may properly divide itself into the same six branches; and will be a perfectly literal and practical following out of the Divine; and will have opposed to it a correspondent Diabolic force of eternally bad work—as much worse than idleness or death, as good work is better than idleness or death.
Good work, then, will be,—
A. Letting in light where there was darkness; as especially into poor rooms and back streets; and generally guiding and administering the sunshine wherever we can, by all the means in our power.
And the correspondent Diabolic work is putting a tax on windows, and blocking out the sun’s light with smoke.
B. Disciplining the falling waters. In the Divine work, this is the ordinance of clouds;[2] in the human it is properly putting the clouds to service; and first stopping the rain where they carry it from the sea, and then keeping it pure as it goes back to the sea again.
And the correspondent Diabolic work is the arrangement of land so as to throw all the water back to the sea as fast as we can;[3] and putting every sort of filth into the stream as it runs. [[228]]
C. The separation of earth from water, and planting it with trees. The correspondent human work is especially clearing morasses, and planting desert ground.
The Dutch, in a small way, in their own country, have done a good deal with sand and tulips; also the North Germans. But the most beautiful type of the literal ordinance of dry land in water is the State of Venice, with her sea-canals, restrained, traversed by their bridges, and especially bridges of the Rivo Alto, or High Bank, which are, or were till a few years since, symbols of the work of a true Pontifex,—the Pontine Marshes being the opposite symbol.
The correspondent Diabolic work is turning good land and water into mud; and cutting down trees that we may drive steam ploughs, etc., etc.
D. The establishment of times and seasons. The correspondent human work is a due watching of the rise and set of stars, and course of the sun; and due administration and forethought of our own annual labours, preparing for them in hope, and concluding them in joyfulness, according to the laws and gifts of Heaven. Which beautiful order is set forth in symbols on all lordly human buildings round the semicircular arches which are types of the rise and fall of days and years.