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THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF

CRUTCHES.

CALLING the other day upon an old friend, who had some time before met with an accident which had disabled him, and compelled him to betake himself to crutches for support, I was surprised to find that his sticks had never been thrown aside; the poor fellow was afraid to take a single step without his crutches. He could not go across the room without them; he did not dare to step into the street without them; the old fellow did not know how healthy he was; but there, obstinately, pertinaciously, he must shamble along on his crutches; a stick, in the street, would have served every purpose, and, in the house, even that faint support was not in the slighest degree needed.— But so he moved through life; and as he went, he grumbled out, "I'm weak, sir, very weak, you see I can't do without this." "Ah! sir, 'twould be a great blessing if I had the

use of my limbs,

as you have."-"Oh, ma'am,"-a long gasp"well, well, God's will be done." And so, from that day, the poor creature used his crutches, and talked of his crutches, till the idea had made him a hypochondriac, and martyred him to its power. To hobble had become an essential part of his life; he would have felt dissatisfied with himself, could he have gone alone; to talk against his crutches was to enter into a conspiracy against him. I ventured to throw out an expostulatory hint:—

"Now, don't you think that those things could be given up? Why, you're only weak because you don't struggle to be strong; now, take my arm-there, there. Now you see you can go without crutches."

Well, I got him to budge a step or two; but I believe ever since he has had a suspicion of me: he looks at me, and shakes his head; he always seems demure when I approach him. If he tries to rise before me, he firmly compresses his lips and teeth together, saying, as plainly as silence can say, "You see what a state I'm in, and yet, you wicked dog, you want me to give up my crutches."

An able-bodied man stumbling through the world on crutches! Once for all, let us admit that it is the most solemn sight the eye can rest on; yet it is not an unfrequent and uncustomary one. Get a man into the habit of hobbling on crutches at all, and the habit will gradually become necess

sary to him, and he be loth to give them up. And how can strength grow, and how can the body become pliant, and muscular, and powerful, on crutches? Thus the weak become more weak, and the incapable yet more incapable. It is a glorious moment when a man breaks a crutch, even although it be on the head of the one who persuaded him to use it-when he determines to walk along the level road in his own strong purpose and power-when he betakes himself to the work of mountain-climbing, and leaves his crutches behind him at the inn where he slept the last night when he determines to be imposed upon, and to impose upon himself, by wooden helps, no longer. Some men have been in health, all their days, and have never known that they are strong; but to the weak man, who has feared to take a step by himself, to the man whose religion it had been to believe that he could not walk alone, it is a moment of high exultation, when the winds of heaven pipe round him, and distant figures before him beckon him onwards, and each turn of the road reveals something new, and each piece of scenery invites to rapidity and energy at such a moment. It is, indeed, a source of high exultation to the man who had deemed himself weak, to be

able to say, "But I am strong."

You see the drift of it, my friends; it is a problem rather difficult to be solved; but the proba

bility is, that every one of you, with this book in your hand, is also leaning upon crutches.The lesson of self-reliance, of independence, is both holy and noble; and yet, alas! almost every soul you meet has its own appropriate crutches; and, still further, it is not an unfrequent occurrence that the weak attempt to persuade, and sometimes do persuade, the strong, that they are too weak and, for very company's sake, try to convert them to crutches. So we have seen a lopsided man, as we should say a man with a "moral squint," and this man has really contrived to get an idea, to fetch up from the unfathomable depths of somewhere, a prejudice, a notion, a whim-let us suppose it a truth; very soon he has exaggerated it-distorted it till it grows into a huge, knotty, gnarled branch of an error; then he cuts it into shape and primness, lends his whole weight to it, makes himself a crutch of it, sets up a crutch shop, and offersgood, benevolent citizen that he is to make you crutches, too, for a price; but if you will not buy, the mischief of the matter is, that he stands at his door, and lays about him, with strong, hearty blows, upon all who go to other shops. He must not only have a crutch himself, and have full liberty to lean upon it, but you, and everybody else, must lean upon that particular crutch too, or you shall have woeful blows. Go into my

L

library, and fetch me down that truly direful history of the battles of the schoolmen, or the history of the middle ages, and read me the battles of the Guelph and Ghibbeline; or run your eyes over the contending philosophical and religious sectarian squabbles of the day; then what does it all come to? Sum them up, and call them "the battles of the crutches." It seems very probable that if each of these disputants, instead of squabbling about a whim, had exercised freely his own intellectual and moral capacity, the histories of these chivalrous, intellectual, and other battles, had been for ever lost to mankind.

The fact is, men are wisely economical in the use of their legs-hence the reason why they like and use crutches. Mental crutches are an apology for laziness. A great many books are bought and read-resolve me the reason why. Would you not think that there was an intellectual voracity among men the spirit of intellectual research— an earnestness in the acquisition of knowledge? Nonsense! At least half the books bought, are never either read or cut; and two-thirds of the other half are crutches for lame souls. Men cannot endure that their spirits should be alone; there must be company, although it should be the most frivolous chit-chat of a fashionable novel. Men cannot endure the labour of digging out their own opinions; they must obtain them ready-made,