of depression, disappointment, bodily sickness, that we are tempted to say?—­I will fight no more.  I cannot mend myself, or the world.  I am what nature has made me; and what I am, I must remain.  I, and all I know, and all I love, are things, not persons; parts of nature, even as the birds upon the bough, only more miserable, because tormented by a hope which never will be fulfilled; an empty pageant of mere phenomena, blown onward toward decay, like dying autumn leaves, before the “everlasting storm which no one guides.”  Is this the inward voice of health and strength? or rather, for evil or for good, that voice which bids the man, the woman, in the mysterious might of the free I within, trample on their own passions, defy their own circumstances, even to the death; fall back, in utter need, on the absolute instinct of self; and even though all seem lost, say with Medea in the tragedy—­

   Che resta?  Io!

Medea?—­Some one will ask, and have a right to ask—­Is that the model which you set before us?  The imperious sorceress, who from the first has known no law but self, her own passions, her own intellect; who, at last, maddened by a grievous wrong, asserts that self by the murder of her own babes?  You might as well set before us as a model Milton’s Satan.

Just so.  Remember first, nevertheless, the old maxim, that the best, when corrupted, is the worst; that the higher the nature, when used aright in its right place, the baser it becomes when used wrongly, in its wrong place.  When Satan fell from his right place, said the old Jews, he became, remember, not a mere brute:  but worse, a fiend.  There is a deep and true philosophy in that.  As long as he was what he was meant to be—­the servant of God—­he was an archangel and more; the fairest of all the sons of the morning.  When he rebelled; when in pride and self-will he tore himself—­his person—­away from that God in whom he lived and moved and had his being:  the personality remained; he could still, like Medea, fall back, even when he knew that he had rebelled against his Creator, on his indomitable self, and reign a self-sufficing king, even in the depths of hell.

But the very strength and richness of that personality made him, like Medea, only the more capable of evil.  He stood, that is, his moral health endured, only by loyalty to God.  When he lost that, he fell; to moral disease:  disease the vaster, the vaster were his own capacities.

And so it is with you, and me, and every soul of man.  Only by loyalty to God can this undying I, this self, this person, which each of us has—­or rather which each of us is—­be anything but a torment and a curse; the more terrible to us, and those around us, the stronger and the richer are the nature and faculties through which it works.

Wouldest thou not be a curse unto thy self?  Then cry with him who wrote the 119th Psalm—­I am Thine.  Oh save the me, whom Thou, O God, hast made.