procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole Universe to
second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions,
towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking this,
disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every
affair. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count heads;
ask Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell."
Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well,--I
perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed.
Within the last half-century or so, either the Universe or else
the heads of men must have altered very much. Half a century
ago, and down from Father Adam's time till then, the Universe,
wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat
abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its
face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately
hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere
persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded
alone, whose number was not the majority in my time!

Or perhaps the chief end of man being now, in these improved
epochs, to make money and spend it, his interests in the Universe
have become amazingly simplified of late; capable of being voted
on with effect by almost anybody? "To buy in the cheapest
market, and sell in the dearest:" truly if that is the summary of
his social duties, and the final divine message he has to follow,
we may trust him extensively to vote upon that. But if it is not,
and never was, or can be? If the Universe will not carry on its
divine bosom any commonwealth of mortals that have no higher
aim,--being still "a Temple and Hall of Doom," not a mere
Weaving-shop and Cattle-pen? If the unfathomable Universe has
decided to _reject_ Human Beavers pretending to be Men; and will