is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm upon the Northern pine.  The same divine forces underlie the growth of both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil, of climate.  Whether the questions which assail my young friend have risen in my reader’s mind or not, he knows perfectly well that nobody can keep such questions from springing up in every young mind of any force or honesty.  As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.  If the world had been wholly peopled with such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would have been a creed like that of Christendom.

I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in this point at least, that a true man’s allegiance is given to that which is highest in his own nature.  He reverences truth, he loves kindness, he respects justice.  The two first qualities he understands well enough.  But the last, justice, at least as between the Infinite and the finite, has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations, that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as a human conception.

As for power, we are outgrowing all superstition about that.  We have not the slightest respect for it as such, and it is just as well to remember this in all our spiritual adjustments.  We fear power when we cannot master it; but just as far as we can master it, we make a slave and a beast of burden of it without hesitation.  We cannot change the ebb and flow of the tides, or the course of the seasons, but we come as near it as we can.  We dam out the ocean, we make roses bloom in winter and water freeze in summer.  We have no more reverence for the sun than we have for a fish-tail gas-burner; we stare into his face with telescopes as at a ballet-dancer with opera-glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms as if they were so many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not want his company and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant.  The gods of the old heathen are the servants of to-day.  Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus, and the bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their pedestals and put on our livery.  We cannot always master them, neither can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle on the wildest natural agencies.  The mob of elemental forces is as noisy and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it well under, except for an occasional outbreak.

When I read the Lady’s letter printed some time since, I could not help honoring the feeling which prompted her in writing it.  But while I respect the innocent incapacity of tender age and the limitations of the comparatively uninstructed classes, it is quite out of the question to act as if matters of common intelligence and universal interest were the private property of a secret society, only to be meddled with by those who know the grip and the password.