'To make the absolute best of what God made,'
to sharpen every faculty, expand every capacity, and bow only to the Eternal.
Æterna æternus tribuit, mortalia confert
Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus.'
Here is the choice, eternal or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah, and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old man, whose whims and whose age we must respect. What is to become of his high claims upon creatures who are to work out an infinite purpose? Il faut honorer la vieillesse? Emerson had anticipated this with his 'pistareen Providence, dressed in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity;' yet it proves that minds are arriving by widely diverging paths at the same truths.
There is nothing ideal or vague in the vigorous efforts he makes in this volume to rise to political economy and to set forth the practical action of capital and industry on life. He says no longer, 'To me commerce is of trivial import,' but endorses Henry Carey's theory of wealth, and acknowledges unreservedly, in its broadest sense, the universal domination of Law. Statistics bourgeon into prophecies under his pen: he does not disdain their significance, but rather aids their influence with all the power which his spasmodic style has given in drawing our grotesque-loving public to him. We suspect Buckle, and feel a cheerful sense of Bacon and Comte. In his plea for socialism, for education, we see the dawn of the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor. 'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky, 'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps.' Here is wealth for want, industry for indolence, distinction for degradation, virtue for vice. It beams clear as the red of morning. Hear it in the whistle of the engine, the roar of the loom, the plowing of the steam-ship through battling waves, the tick of the telegraph, the whirr of the mill wheel, the click of the sewing machine; and he who doubts still may listen to the voice of cannon, the whistling of lances and the clash of swords, and catch the notes of the same chant with a sterner chorus. Hear even the idealist Schelling awaiting that broader freedom than any we have yet known:—
'The third period in history will be that when that which in preceding periods appeared as Destiny or Nature, shall develop and manifest itself as Providence. Thus what seems to us as the work of Destiny or Nature is already the beginning of a Providence, which reveals itself but imperfectly. When we shall look for the birth of this period, man can not say, but know that when it is, God will be.'
And Emerson takes up the strain with words of fire:—
'If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want, with his scourge; if War, with his cannonade; if Christianity, with its charity; if Trade, with its money; if Art, with its portfolios; if Science, with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set man's dull nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,—make way and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out—the age of the brain and the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.'