That is to every thing created pre-eminently useful, which enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself.
Man's use and function is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.
Whatever enables us to fulfill this function is, in the pure and first sense of the word, useful to us. Pre-eminently, therefore, what sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist are, in a secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would be better that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence.
And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone useful; and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables: men who think that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers as husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw, are better than the pine forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that, though God "hath made every thing beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."
This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the faith; but now, when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice and regard for each other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem rising out of their rest—evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also, a fear greater than the sword and sedition: that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water is sure; that gratitude to him may cease, because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation; that innovation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp.—Ruskin.
[THE LANGUAGE OF THE EAGLE.]
It is one of the difficulties of those who undertake to make public speeches, that sometimes they are embarrassed about the heads of their discourses; and so I am somewhat troubled at finding the inferior position of the American eagle, inasmuch as he has but one head, while the Russian eagle has two. I suppose that the explanation of this ornithological difference arises from the necessity of the Russian eagle having one head to watch over his large possessions in Asia, and the other head to look after his small property in Europe. I feel a good deal of confidence in speaking of the American eagle in contrast. I can see that if the American eagle has but one head, it embodies therein the national sentiment now prevailing, of one country and one people. It is very true that our brethren of the South—for I still call them our brethren—have been under the impression that ours was a double-headed eagle, with a Northern and a Southern head, with this distinction over the Russian; that the Southern was the larger and more important head of the two, and we are now engaged in the somewhat expensive and troublesome task of correcting that mistake in natural history. There is a good deal that is appropriate, and sometimes something that is suggestive, in these national symbols. The lion, for instance, is a very hungry beast, and the large portion of the globe which he has got into his possession shows the appropriateness of the selection of the symbol. The cock, as we know, is a very boisterous and demonstrative bird, who never does anything that he does not make a noise about. And certainly the Gallic neighbor of the English lion has never been distinguished for his modesty whenever he has accomplished any thing in arts or in arms. The eagle is a high-soaring bird, and I had better bring before you what an English poet says of him:
He clasps the crag with hooked hands,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed in an azure world he stands;
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
If the illustration had been carried further we might be content with this English authority that the eagle, as typical of Russia and of the United States, is to be armed with that thunderbolt which the Greeks thought to be the prerogative of Jupiter. The American eagle has been distinguished for the quickness of his flight; and I do not think that our bitterest enemies can ever bring against us the charge of slowness. There are some points of resemblance between the United States and Russia. Russia, like us, is made up of many nationalities: and we have had recently the most satisfactory evidence that the Russian eagle is soaring in the same quarter as we are—soaring beyond the crowing of the cock or the roaring of the lion.