Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances.  The man is all.  Everything has two sides, a good and an evil.  Every advantage has its tax.  I learn to be content.  But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency.  The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, What boots it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature.  The soul is not a compensation, but a life.  The soul is.  Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.  Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole.  Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself.  Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence.  Vice is the absence or departure of the same.  Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade, on which, as a background, the living universe paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not.  It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm.  It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature.  There is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before men and angels.  Has he therefore outwitted the law?  Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie with him, he so far deceases from nature.  In some manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss.  There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being.  In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.  There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.  The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism.

Man’s life is a progress, and not a station.  His instinct is trust.  Our instinct uses “more” and “less” in application to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave.  There is no tax on the good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence without any comparative.