Here then I close this discourse.  How much it enrolls!  How very simple it is!  It is the whole gospel.  When you make an application of it to all the phases of organization and classification of human interests and developments, it seems as though it were as big as the universe.  Yet when you condense it, it all comes back to the one simple creed:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.”  Who is my neighbor?  A certain man went down to Jericho, and so on.  That tells you who your neighbor is.  Whosoever has been attacked by robbers, has been beaten, has been thrown down—­by liquor, by gambling, or by any form of wickedness; whosoever has been cast into distress, and you are called on to raise him up—­that is your neighbor.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  That is the gospel.

A NEW ENGLAND SUNDAY

From ‘Norwood’

It is worth all the inconveniences arising from the occasional over-action of New England Sabbath observance, to obtain the full flavor of a New England Sunday.  But for this, one should have been born there; should have found Sunday already waiting for him, and accepted it with implicit and absolute conviction, as if it were a law of nature, in the same way that night and day, summer and winter, are parts of nature.  He should have been brought up by parents who had done the same thing, as they were by parents even more strict, if that were possible; until not religious persons peculiarly, but everybody—­not churches alone, but society itself, and all its population, those who broke it as much as those who kept it—­were stained through with the color of Sunday.  Nay, until Nature had adopted it, and laid its commands on all birds and beasts, on the sun and winds, and upon the whole atmosphere; so that without much imagination one might imagine, in a genuine New England Sunday of the Connecticut River Valley stamp, that God was still on that day resting from all the work which he had created and made, and that all his work rested with him!

Over all the town rested the Lord’s peace!  The saw was ripping away yesterday in the carpenter’s shop, and the hammer was noisy enough.  Today there is not a sign of life there.  The anvil makes no music to-day.  Tommy Taft’s buckets and barrels give forth no hollow, thumping sound.  The mill is silent—­only the brook continues noisy.  Listen!  In yonder pine woods what a cawing of crows!  Like an echo, in a wood still more remote other crows are answering.  But even a crow’s throat to-day is musical.  Do they think, because they have black coats on, that they are parsons, and have a right to play pulpit with all the pine-trees?  Nay.  The birds will not have any such monopoly,—­they are all singing, and singing all together, and no one cares whether his song rushes across another’s or not.  Larks and robins, blackbirds and orioles, sparrows and bluebirds, mocking cat-birds and wrens, were furrowing