and our literature contains essays upon love and friendship which, in
our judgment, are not equalled in the literature of the world.

Nor is a moral discipline wanting to second this tendency. A terrible
social anomaly has been forced upon us,--has had time to intertwine
itself with trade, with creeds, with partisan prejudice and patriotic
pride, and, having become next to unconquerable, now shows that it can
keep no terms and must kill or be killed. And through this the question
of man's duties to man, on the broadest scale, is incessantly kept in
agitation. It is like a lurid handwriting across the sky,--"Learn what
man should be and do to his fellow." And the companion sentence is
this,--"Thy justice to the strangers shall be the best security to
thine own household."

* * * * *

By the co-working of these two grand tendencies we obtain at once the
largest speculative breadth and the closest practical and personal
interest. What sweeter promise could any one ask than that of this rare
and admirable combination? Thought and action have been more than
sufficiently separated. The philosopher has discoursed to a few, and in
the dialect of the few, in Academic shades; sanctity has hidden itself
away, lost in the joy of its secret contemplations; the great world has
rolled by, unhearing, unheeding,--like London roaring with cataract
thunder around St. Paul's, while within the choral service is performed
to an audience of one. Thinking and doing have hardly recognized each
other. Now we are not of those vague, enthusiastic persons who fancy
that all truths are for all ears,--that the highest spiritual fact can
be communicated, where there is no spiritual apprehension to lay hold
upon it. _He that hath ears_, let him hear. Nor would we attempt to