“Where are you?  Do you believe in the Emersonian ’law of compensation,’ rigid and inevitable as fate?  I say, Beulah, do you believe it?”

“Yes; I believe it.”

“Hand me the volume there on the table.  His exposition of ’the absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,’ is the grandest triumph of his genius.  For an hour this sentence has been ringing in my ears:  ’In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition.’  We are samples of the truth of this.  Ah, Beulah, I have paid a heavy, heavy price!  You are destitute of one, it is true, but exempt from the other.  Yet, mark you, this law of ‘compensation’ pertains solely to earth and its denizens; the very existence and operation of the law precludes the necessity, and I may say the possibility, of that future state, designed, as theologians argue, for rewards and punishments.”  She watched her visitor very closely.

“Of course it nullifies the belief in future adjustments, for he says emphatically, ’Justice is not postponed.  A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.’  ’What will you have?  Pay for it, and take it.  Nothing venture, nothing have.’  There is no obscurity whatever in that remarkable essay on compensation.”  Beulah took up one of the volumes, and turned the pages carelessly.

“But all this would shock a Christian.”

“And deservedly; for Emerson’s works, collectively and individually, are aimed at the doctrines of Christianity.  There is a grim, terrible fatalism scowling on his pages which might well frighten the reader who clasped the Bible to his heart.”

“Yet you accept his ‘compensation.’  Are you prepared to receive his deistic system?” Cornelia leaned forward and spoke eagerly.  Beulah smiled.

“Why strive to cloak the truth?  I should not term his fragmentary system ‘deistic.’  He knows not yet what he believes.  There are singular antagonisms existing among even his pet theories.”

“I have not found any,” replied Cornelia, with a gesture of impatience.

“Then you have not studied his works as closely as I have done.  In one place he tells you he feels ’the eternity of man, the identity of his thought,’ that Plato’s truth and Pindar’s fire belong as much to him as to the ancient Greeks, and on the opposite page, if I remember aright, he says, ’Rare extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature.  I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.  Hence, evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess, inspired by the divine afflatus.’  Thus at one moment he finds no ’antiquity in the worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, or Socrates; they are as much his as theirs,’ and at another clearly asserts that spirits do come into the world to discover to us new truths.  At some points we are told that