with zeal to defy censure; he shall not know if there be a spectator in the world; his most public deed shall be done in a divine privacy, on which no eye intrudes,—­his most private in the boundless publicities of Nature; his deed, when done, falls away from him, like autumn apples from their boughs, no longer his, but the world’s and destiny’s; neither the captive of yesterday nor the propitiator of to-morrow, he abides simply, majestically, like a god, in being and doing.  Meanwhile, blame and praise whirl but as unrecognized cloudlets of gloom or glitter beneath his feet, enveloping and often blinding those who utter them, but to him never attaining.

It is not easy at present to suggest the real measure and significance of such manhood, because this age has debased its imagination, by the double trick, first, of confounding man with his body, and next, of considering the body, not as a symbol of truth, but only as an agent in the domain of matter,—­comparing its size with the sum total of physical space, and its muscular power with the sum total of physical forces.  Yet

  “What know we greater than the soul?”

A man is no outlying province, nor does any province lie beyond him.  East, West, North, South, and height and depth are contained in his bosom, the poles of his being reaching more widely, his zenith and nadir being more sublime and more profound.  We are cheated by nearness and intimacy.  Let us look at man with a telescope, and we shall find no star or constellation of sweep so grand, no nebulae or star-dust so provoking and suggestive to fancy.  In truth, there are no words to say how either large or small, how significant or insignificant, men may be.  Though solar and stellar systems amaze by their grandeur of scale, yet is true manhood the maximum of Nature; though microscopic and sub-microscopic protophyta amaze by their inconceivable littleness, yet is mock manhood Nature’s minimum.  The latter is the only negative quantity known to Nature; the former the only revelation of her entire heart.

In concluding, need I say that only the pure can repose in his action,—­only he obtain deliverance by his deed, and after deliverance from it?  The egotism, the baseness, the partialities that are in our performance are hooks and barbs by which it wounds and wearies us in the passage, and clings to us being past.

Law governs all; no favor is shown; the event is as it must be; only he who has no blinding partiality toward himself, who is whole and one with the whole, he who is Nature and Law and divine Necessity, can be blest with that blessedness which Nature is able to give only by her presence.  There is a labor and a rest that are the same, one fact, one felicity; in this are power, beauty, immortality; by existence as a whole it is always perfectly exemplified; to man, as the eye of existence, it is also possible; but it is possible to him only as he is purely man,—­only as he abandons himself to the divine principles of his life:  in other words, this Sabbath remaineth in very deed to no other than the people of God.