There is no virtue which is final; all are initial.  The virtues of society are vices of the saint.  The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

    Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
    Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.[712]

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also.  I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time.  I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine pyrrhonism,[713] at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God.

I am not careful to justify myself.  I own I am gladdened[714] by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions.  But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter.  Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false.  I unsettle all things.  No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul.  Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.  That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles.  For ever it labors to create a life and thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which is made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring.  Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour?  Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease:  all others run into this one.  We call it by many names,—­fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime:  they are all forms of old age:  they are rest, conservatism, appropriation,