of which the one is virtuously attracted toward heaven, while the other is viciously drawn to the earth; but he countenances the inference that the earthward proclivity of the latter is to be accounted pure misfortune.  But to the universe there is neither fortune nor misfortune; there is only the reaper, Destiny, and his perpetual harvest.  All that occurs on a universal scale lies in the line of a pure success.  Nor can the universe attain any success by pushing past man and leaving him aside.  That were like the prosperity of a father who should enrich himself by disinheriting his only son.

Principles necessary to all action must of course appear in moral action.  The moral imagination, which pioneers and produces inward advancement, works under the same conditions with the imagination of the artist, and must needs have somewhat to work upon.  Man is both sculptor and quarry,—­and a great noise and dust of chiselling is there sometimes in his bosom.  If, therefore, we find in him somewhat which does not immediately and actively sympathize with his moral nature, let us not fancy this element equally out of sympathy with his pure destiny.  The impulsion and the resistance are alike included in the design of our being.  Hunger—­to illustrate—­respects food, food only.  It asks leave to be hunger neither of your conscience, your sense of personal dignity, nor indeed of your humanity in any form; but exists by its own permission, and pushes with brute directness toward its own ends.  True, the soul may at last so far prevail as to make itself felt even in the stomach; and the true gentleman could as soon relish a lunch of porcupines’ quills as a dinner basely obtained, though it were of nightingales’ tongues.  But this is sheer conquest on the part of the soul, not any properly gastric inspiration at all; and it is in furnishing opportunity for precisely such conquest that the lower nature becomes a stairway of ascent for the soul.

And now, if in the relations between every manly spirit and the world around him we discover the same fact, are we not by this time prepared to contemplate it altogether with dry eyes?  What if it be true, that in trade, in politics, in society, all tends to low levels?  What if disadvantages are to be suffered by the grocer who will not sell adulterated food, by the politician who will not palter, by the diplomatist who is ashamed to lie?  For this means only that no one can be honest otherwise than by a productive energy of honesty in his own bosom.  In other words,—­a man reaches the true welfare of a human soul only when his bosom is a generative centre and source of noble principles; and therefore, in pure, wise kindness to man, the world is so arranged that there shall be perpetual need of this access and reinforcement of principle.  Society, the State, and every institution, grow lean the moment there is a falling off in this divine fruitfulness of man’s heart, because only in virtue of bearing such fruit is man worthy of his name.  Honor and honesty are constantly consumed between men, that they may be forever newly demanded in them.