Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life;
and although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had
every step of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory,
tell me what definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to
manhood, or from both to age? The settled tenor which first
strikes the eye is but the shadow of a delusion. This is gone;
that never truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond
recognition. Times and men and circumstances change about your
changing character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane
affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the
best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your own Past
truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future? And if
this be questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes,
should we not watch other men driving beside us on their unknown
careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales,
doing and suffering in another sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene,
do you offer me these two score words? these five bald
prohibitions? For the moral precepts are no more than five; the
first four deal rather with matters of observance than of conduct;
the tenth, THOU SHALT NOT COVET, stands upon another basis, and
shall be spoken of ere long. The Jews, to whom they were first
given, in the course of years began to find these precepts
insufficient; and made an addition of no less than six hundred and
fifty others! They hoped to make a pocket-book of reference on
morals, which should stand to life in some such relation, say, as
Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of whist. The comparison is
just, and condemns the design; for those who play by rule will