NO NATIONAL GREATNESS WITHOUT MORALITY.

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contempt of our neighbors, and just punishment from Almighty God. Take a lesson, I say, from the great duke for the battle of life. Be not fretful and anxious about the morrow. Face things like men; count the chances like men; lay your plans like men; but remember, like men, that a fresh chance may at any moment spoil all your plans; remember that there are a thousand dangers round you from which your prudence cannot save you. Do your best, and then, like the great duke, comfort yourself with the thought that you have done your best, and, like him, trust in God. Remember that God is really and in very truth your Father, and that without him not a sparrow falls to the ground; and are ye not of more value than many sparrows, O ye of little faith?

XXXIV. NO NATIONAL GREATNESS WITHOUT MORALITY. W. E. CHANNING.

WHEN We look forward to the probable growth of this country; when we think of the millions of human beings who are to spread over our present territory; of the career of improvement and glory open to this new people; of the impulse which free institutions, if prosperous, may be expected to give to philosophy, religion, science, literature, and arts; of the vast field in which the experiment is to be made; of what the unfettered powers of man may achieve; of the bright pages of history which our fathers have filled, and of the advantages under which their toils and virtues have placed us for carrying on their work, when we think of all this, can we help, for a moment, surrendering ourselves. to bright visions of our country's glory, before which all the glories of the past are to fade away? Is it presumption to say, that, if just to ourselves and all nations, we shall be felt through this whole continent, that we shall spread our language, institutions, and civilization through a wider space than any nation has yet filled with a like beneficent in

fluence? And are we prepared to barter these hopes, this sublime moral empire, tor conquests by force? Are we prepared to sink to the level of unprincipled nations, to content ourselves with a vulgar, guilty greatness, to adopt in our youth maxims and ends which must brand our future with sordidness, oppression, and shame? This country cannot without peculiar infamy run the common race of national rapacity. Our origin, institutions, and position are peculiar, and all favor an upright, honorable course. We have not the apologies of nations hemmed in by narrow bounds, or threatened by the overshadowing power of ambitious neighbors. If we surrender ourselves to a selfish policy, we shall sin almost without temptation, and forfeit opportunities of greatness vouchsafed to no other people, for a prize below contempt.

I have alluded to the want of wisdom with which we have been accustomed to speak of our destiny as a people. We are destined (that is the word) to overspread North America; and, intoxicated with the idea, it matters little to us how we accomplish our fate. To spread, to supplant others, to cover a boundless space, this seems our ambition, no matter what influence we spread with us. Why cannot we rise to noble conceptions of our destiny? Why do we not feel that our work as a nation is, to carry freedom, religion, science, and a nobler form of human nature over this continent? and why do we not remember, that to diffuse these blessings we must first cherish them in our own borders; and that whatever deeply and permanently corrupts us will make our spreading influence a curse, not a blessing, to this new world? I am not prophet enough to read our fate. I believe, indeed, that we are to make our futurity for ourselves. I believe that a nation's destiny lies in its character, in the principles which govern its policy, and bear rule in the hearts of its citizens. I take my stand on God's moral and eternal law. A nation, renouncing and defying this, cannot be free, cannot be great.

XXXV. AWAIT THE ISSUE. - CARLYLE.

I. In this world, with its wild whirling eddies and mad foam oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were wise because they denied, and knew forever not to be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I find here below the just thing, and true thing.

2. My friend, if thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in support of an unjust thing, and infinite bonfires visibly waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on behalf of it, I would advise thee to call halt, to fling down thy baton, and say, "In Heaven's name, no!"

3. Thy "success"? Poor fellow, what will thy success amount to? If the thing is unjust, thou hast not succeeded; no, not though bonfires blazed from north to south, and bells rang, and editors wrote leading articles, and the just things lay trampled out of sight, to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing.

4. It is the right and noble alone that will have victory in this struggle; the rest is wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness, and of that only, is all confusion tending. We already know whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will have none! The heaviest will reach the centre. The heaviest has its deflections, its obstructions, nay, at times its reboundings; whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating, See, your heaviest ascends!" but at all moments it is moving centreward, fast as is convenient for it; sinking, sinking; and, by laws older than the world, old as the maker's first plan of the world, it has to arrive there.

5. Await the issue. In all battles, if you await the issue, each fighter has prospered according to his right. His right and his might, at the close of the account, were one and the same. He has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his right, he has prevailed. His very death is no victory over him. He dies indeed; but his work lives, very truly lives.

6. A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England; but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous, unfair terms, a part of it; commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and Temple of the Brave, that there be a just, real union, as of brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of slave and master. If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was not the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland: no, because brave men rose there and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like slaves; and ye shall not, and cannot!"

7. Fight on, thou brave, true heart, and falter not, through dark fortune and through bright. The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no further, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory. The falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it ought to be; but the truth of it is part of Nature's own laws, co-operates with the world's eternal tendencies, and cannot be conquered.

XXXVI. THE MIRACLES OF NATURE. - CARLYLE.

You remember that fancy of Aristotle's, of a man who had grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, says the philosopher, his rapt astonishment, at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his

whole heart would be kindled by that sight; he would discern it well to be God-like; his son would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such a child-like greatness was in the primitive nature. The first Pagan thinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, was precisely the child-man of Aristotle. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes, and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the like, and so with a name, dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, indescribable. Nature was to this man what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preter natural. This green, flowery, rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every motion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk; but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle, wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.