of automatic ceremony. Nor is it in China alone that men may be found
who can hardly be accredited with proper personality. As one dying may
distribute his property in legacies to various institutions and
organizations,--so much, for example, to the Tract Society, so much to
the Colonization Society, and the like,--in the same manner do many
make wills at the outset of life for the disposal of their own personal
powers, and do nothing afterward but execute this testament,--executing
themselves in another sense at the same time. They parcel out
themselves, their judgment, their conscience, and whatsoever pertains
to their spiritual being, among the customs, traditions, institutions,
etiquettes of their time, and renounce all claim to a free existence.
After such a piece of spiritual _felo-de-se_, the man is nothing but
one wheel in a machine, or even but one cog upon a wheel. Thenceforth
he merely hangs together;--simple cohesion is the utmost approximation
to action which can be truly attributed to him.

And as nothing is so ridiculous, so, few things are so mischievous, as
the sincere insincerity, the estrangement from fact, of those who have
thus parted with themselves. It is worse, if anything can be worse,
than hypocrisy itself. The hypocrite sees two things,--the fact and the
fiction, the gold and its counterfeit; he has virtue enough to know
that he is a hypocrite. But the _post-mortem_ man, the walking legacy,
does not recognize the existence of eternal Fact; it has never occurred
to his mind that anything could be more serious than "spiritual
taking-on" and make-belief. An innocent old gentleman, being at a play
where the heroine is represented as destroyed in attempting to
cross a broken bridge, rose, upon seeing her approach it, and in tones
of the deepest concern offered his opinion that said bridge was unsafe!
The _post-mortem_ man reverses this harmless blunder, and makes it
anything but harmless by the change; as that one took theatricals to be