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 confuse the functions of sayer and doer.  But let there be a sympathy and understanding between them, that, when achieved, will mark an epoch in the world’s history.  Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere is speculative intellect so colored with the hues of practical interest without limiting its own flight; nowhere are labor and executive power so receptive of pure intellectual suggestion.  The union of what is deepest and most recondite in thought with clear-sighted sagacity has been well hit by Lowell in his description of the typical American scholar,—­

  “Sits in a mystery calm and intense,
  And looks round about him with sharp common-sense.”

That is, the New Man has two things that seldom make each other’s acquaintance,—­Sight and Insight.  Accordingly, our subtilest thinker, whom the scholarly Mr. Vaughan classes with the mystics and accuses of going beyond the legitimate range even of mystics, has written such an estimate of the most practical nation in the world as has never been written of that or any other before.  The American knows what is about him, has tact, sagacity, conversance with surfaces and circumstances, is the shrewdest guesser in the world; and seeing him on this side