for mummying men alive. Take one into keeping, prescribe everything,
thoughts, actions, manners, so that he never shall find either
permission or opportunity to ask his own intellect, What is true? nor
his own heart, What is right? nor to consider within himself what is
intrinsically good and worthy of a man; and if he does not rebel, you
will make him as good a mummy as Egyptian catacombs can boast.

The capital art of life is to renew and augment your power by its
expenditure. It was intimated some eighteen centuries since that the
highest are obtained only by loss of the same; and the transmutation of
loss into gain is the essence and perfection of all spiritual
economies. Now of this art of arts he is already master who steadily
draws upon his own spiritual resources. The soul is an extraordinary
well; the way to replenish is to draw from it. It is more miraculous
than the widow's cruse;--that simply continued unexhausted,--never
less, indeed, but also never more; while from this the more you take,
the more remains in it. Were it, therefore, desired to arrange with
forethought a scheme of life that should afford the highest
invigoration, in such scheme there should be the minimum of
prescription, and nothing be so sedulously avoided as the superseding
of inward and active _principles_ by outward and passive _rules_;--that
is, life would be made as much moral and spontaneous, as little
political and mechanical, as possible.

And this does not ill describe our own case. No civilized nation is so
little imprisoned in precedents and traditions. Our national maxim is,
"The world is too much governed." In the degree of this release we are,
of course, thrown back upon underlying principles and universal
persuasions,--since these of necessity become, in the absence of more
artificial ties, the chief bond of such peace and coöperation as