who, without impropriety be it spoken, are the maggots that breed in the dung of the great.  A certain friend of mine always appears to me in the similitude of a first edition of one of Mr. Hardy’s novels.  I have the greatest difficulty at times to prevent myself forcibly setting him upon my shelf to complete my set; for, oddly enough, he is the one bit of Hardyana I lack.  In which confession I let the reader into the secret of my own petty limitations.  To have one’s horizon bounded by a book-plate, to have no hope, no wish in life, beyond a first edition!  The workers, however sectional, have some place in the text of the great book of life, but such mere testers and tasters of existence have hardly a place even in the gloss, though it be printed in the most microscopic diamond.

And every moment, as we said, we are being turned out smaller and smaller from the mill of Time.  You ask your little boy what he would like to be when he grows up.  To your consternation he answers, ‘A man!’ You hide your face:  you cannot tell him how impossible it is now to be that.  Poor little chap!  He is born centuries too late.  You cannot promise even that he shall be a tailor, for by the time he is old enough to be apprenticed, how do you know how that ancient profession may be divided up?  May you not have sadly to tell him:  ’My poor boy, it is impossible to make you that—­for there are no longer any whole-tailors.  You may, if you like, be a thread-waxer or a needle-threader; you may be one of the thirty men it takes to make a buttonhole, but a complete tailor—­alas! it is impossible.’

Who will save us from this remorseless law of eternal subdivision?  To make one complete man out of all this vast collection of snips and snippets of humanity.  To piece all the trades, professions, and fads together, like a puzzle, till one saw the honest face of a genuine man round and whole once more.  To take these dry bones of the Valley of Commerce, and powerfully breathe into them the unifying breath of life, that once more they stand up, not as fractional bones of the wrist or the ankle of manhood, but mighty, full-blooded men as of old.  Ah! we must wait for a new creation for that.

The mystics have a suggestive fancy that all our vast complex life once existed as a peaceful unit in the mind of God.  But as God, brooding in the abyss, meditated upon Himself, various thoughts separated themselves and revolved within the atmosphere of His mind, at first unconscious of themselves or each other.  Presently, desire of separate existence awoke in these shadowy things, a lust of corporeality grew upon them, and hence at last the fall into physical life, the realisation in concrete form of their diaphanous individualities.  And that original cause of man’s separation from deity, this desire of subdivision, how it has gone on operating, more and more!  We call it differentiation, but the mystic would describe it as dividing ourselves more and more from God, the primeval