‘Take no thought for the morrow.’  Ask the Successful Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not only a silly but an immoral position.  All we believe, all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane.  We are not then of the ‘same mind that was in Christ.’  We disagree with Christ.  Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.  Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may recognise:  ’Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.’

It may be objected that these are what are called ‘hard sayings’; and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian although it leave some of these sayings upon one side.  But this is a very gross delusion.  Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be done.  The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible.  In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with these mortal eyes.  But what any man can say of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation to this little and plain corner, which is no less visible to us than to him.  We are looking on the same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow the demonstration.  The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his intention.  The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old street-lamp.  And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet, and to think of different things in the same order.  To be of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept.  You do not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead at noon.  It is by