imagination and keen feeling, little fettered by anything in the nature of good taste, may by strong statements and a fiery manner draw a mob of unthinking hearers:  but thoughtful men and women will not find anything in all that, that awakens the response of their inner nature in its truest depths; they must have religious instruction into which real experience has been transfused; and the worth of the instruction will be in direct proportion to the amount of real experience which is embodied in it.  And after all, it is better to be wise and good than to be gay and happy, if we must choose between the two things; and it is worth while to be severely beaten about the head, if that is the condition on which alone we can gain true wisdom.  True wisdom is cheap at almost any price.  But it does not follow at all that you will be happy (in the vulgar sense) in direct proportion as you are wise.  I suppose most middle-aged people, when they receive the ordinary kind wish at New-Year’s time of a Happy New-Year, feel that happy is not quite the word; and feel that, too, though well aware that they have abundant reason for gratitude to a kind Providence.  It is not here that we shall ever be happy,—­that is, completely and perfectly happy.  Something will always be coming to worry and distress.  And a hundred sad possibilities hang over us:  some of them only too certainly and quickly drawing near.  Yet people are content, in a kind of way.  They have learnt the great lesson of Resignation.

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There are many worthy people who would be quite fevered and flurried by good fortune, if it were to come to any very great degree.  It would injure their heart.  As for bad fortune, they can stand it nicely, they have been accustomed to it so long.  I have known a very hard-wrought man, who had passed, rather early in life, through very heavy and protracted trials.  I have heard him say, that, if any malicious enemy wished to kill him, the course would be to make sure that tidings of some signal piece of prosperity should arrive by post on each of six or seven successive days.  It would quite unhinge and unsettle him, he said.  His heart would go:  his nervous system would break down.  People to whom pieces of good-luck come rare and small have a great curiosity to know how a man feels when he is suddenly told that he has drawn one of the greatest prizes in the lottery of life.  The kind of feeling, of course, will depend entirely on the kind of man.  Yet very great prizes, in the way of dignity and duty, do for the most part fall to men who in some measure deserve them, or who at least are not conspicuously undeserving of them and unfit for them.  So that it is almost impossible that the great news should elicit merely some unworthy explosion of gratified self-conceit.  The feeling would in almost every case be deeper and worthier.  One would like to be sitting at breakfast with a truly good man, when the letter from the Prime-Minister