them apart in spite of the hugest efforts that can be made to attract
them to a point of mutual interest; they who hope either by subterfuge
or unselfish zeal, to reconcile phases of human character that have
not originally sprung from a common root of harmonious unison or
contrast, are as sure to see their ambition as ingloriously defeated
as if they had revived the search for the philosopher's stone.

And yet how much estrangement there is among men and women who, if
they had never been bound together by the sacred and solemn pledges of
wedded love, are supposed still to live according to a precept of
universal charity? How indifferent they become to one another's
fortune or fate? How repulsive to them the very suggestion of entering
generously into one another's lives to share each other's pleasures
and pains?

The world is full of this occult antagonism; every day Christians, as
I have known them, look upon the happiness or sorrow of their brother
toilers as so much subtracted from their own glad or miserable
experience. Hence do they begrudge the smiles of fortune that cheer
another life outside their own, and are so easily satisfied to see
furrows on other brows than their own. I know that the human heart is
instinctively covetous of earthly happiness, and, in nine cases out of
ten argues that its end justifies the means, whatever they may be, of
insuring it. But I also know, that those fitful flashes of sunlight
that cross the path of struggling mortals in the course of an ordinary
human life, are too visionary and short-lived to begin to repay us for
the unworthy barter of our better selves, which is the price of such
transient joys.

What is real happiness but a memory or an anticipation? Do we realize