fortune of his life. You would not dishonour yourself for money;
which is at least tangible; would you do it, then, for a doubtful
forecast in politics, or another person's theory in morals?

So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can
calculate the bearing of his own behaviour even on those
immediately around him, how much less upon the world at large or on
succeeding generations! To walk by external prudence and the rule
of consequences would require, not a man, but God. All that we
know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is our soul with its
fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts which commend
themselves to that. The precepts are vague when we endeavour to
apply them; consequences are more entangled than a wisp of string,
and their confusion is unrestingly in change; we must hold to what
we know and walk by it. We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by
knowledge.

You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently
respectable: you love him because you love him; that is love, and
any other only a derision and grimace. It should be the same with
all our actions. If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should
be one who was never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on
the absolute consent of all his parts and faculties, submitted in
every action of his life to a self-dictation as absolute and
unreasoned as that which bids him love one woman and be true to her
till death. But we should not conceive him as sagacious,
ascetical, playing off his appetites against each other, turning
the wing of public respectable immorality instead of riding it
directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand
sinister compromises and considerations. The one man might be