least resistance carried over from the material into the spiritual sphere. Every physical body has a disposition to maintain the condition in which it finds itself. That is the principle of inertia. It is commonly understood to mean only that bodies have a disposition to remain immovable and unchanged. And this misunderstanding is carried over into the metaphorical meanings of the word; and, when we say that a man is inert, we mean that he is sluggish, dull, immovable. But there is as much inertia in a physical body's disposition to go on in the way it is going as to remain in the position in which it is. As with the physical inertia, so with the spiritual, for which Habit is another name. Every habit idleness, industry, generosity, meanness, intemperance, temperance, selfishness, benevolence- tends to its own perpetuation and increase. If you don't want to be a thing, then do not do it many times. If the line of the least resistance manifestly leads to physical or intellectual or moral ruin, then-right about face!

We are permitted not only to perceive that these things are so, but, to some extent, how they are so. Like loveth like, the proverb says, or, should I say, the poet sings? There is a proverb that says something to the same effect: "Birds of a feather flock together."

Now there is warning here, as well as simple and indifferent fact. We must beware of the fatality of an environment selected by our dominant tendencies of thought and feeling. When we discover that we are having everything pretty much our own way, that all is grist that comes to our mill, that almost everything we read and almost every one we meet tends to confirm us in our personal opinion, we must begin to suspect ourselves, to ask whether we are not following too complacently the line of the least resistance, seeking too much the sympathy of those who are likely to agree with us, or for the sake of good fellowship avoiding grounds of difference with our acquaintances and friends. Friendship is hardly worth the having that puts a padlock on our lips. Far better that which is equal to the stress and strain of manly difference!

To him that hath shall be given. The modus operandi in the sphere of public thought and action is as clear as clear can be. The belief or policy once dominant becomes selective of our environment of men or books; and this re-enforces our belief, strengthens our confidence in our policy, whatever it may be. We read the newspapers, the arguments, the speeches, that will confirm us in our faith; and we give a wide berth to those of a different and opposing character. So doing, we follow the line of the least resistance. As with matters of public thought and action, so with matters of the pure intellect, and with matters of social theory and religious doctrine and observance. I look into my own heart, and write. My inclination is to read the books that will confirm my well-established thought, philosophic, economic, theological. I dare not say that I should not have been the chief of sinners in this kind but for my happy fortune as a reviewer of many books. As they come to me, they are of all kinds,-realistic, idealistic, experiential, intuitional, socialistic, individualistic, conservative, heretical, theistic, atheistic, and so on. And the consequence is that I am not so cock-sure, so absolutely certain, so dogmatic about many things as I might otherwise be. For there are a good many things which, to feel entirely sure about, you must only read one book or one set of books. If you read more, you will have to stop and think; and before you know it you will have "the fatal disqualification of seeing the other side." But there are great compensations in the wider view. It is destructive of Carlyle's estimate of the human population, "mostly fools." You find that people who have ten times your brains and your patience of investigation have not arrived at your opinions; and, though it may still be hard for you to see how this one or that can think as he does theologically, or, thinking as he does, stay where he is, it is not so hard as it would be without this discipline. If there is any one set of books that has helped me more than others, it is the biographies of men distinguished in the different religious sects. They have not made me doubt —

no, never for an hour- the essential soundness of my Unitarian faith; but they have enabled me to see to what extent men's theological beliefs are symbolical, and how sweet and excellent the things they symbolize may be, while to the symbol itself one is not attracted in the least. And they enable you to see how wonderfully the character and life transcend their doctrinal concomitants. When, as a little boy, I asked the apothecary to put a "libel" on the bottle, he seemed to be amused; but that theological labels are very often, if not generally, libels I have since found to be a good saying and worthy of all acceptation.

As it is in intellectual matters, so is it in the moral. You know about the Concord woman who said to Emerson, "When you enter a room, I resolve that I will try to make human nature seem beautiful to you." I could wish that she had done so, and succeeded, and not said anything about it. Doubtless there are many who have worked the mystery this wise, perhaps unconsciously. That is the way of the world. If men expect goodness and nobility, it comes to them, like doves to the windows. If they expect things hateful and unclean, such rain upon them. Max Nordau has a fixed idea that degeneracy is the salient feature of the closing century. So possessed is he with this idea that his own sanity is endangered, and is sometimes seriously impeached; but on this account its attractive force is not less conspicuous. He finds all the facts he wants to justify his preconception. The excesses and mistakes of genius make genius itself intolerable to him ; and he hails the utter lack of it in Mr. Alfred Austin as a delightful omen of the day when the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of Commonplace, and Dulness shall enjoy a universal reign. So it was with Schopenhauer. He was just the man to whom to turn one's seamy side; and, consequently, for confirmation of his pessimism he did not lack. You know there was a Scotch woman who said of her minister that, if there was a cross text in the Bible, he would be sure to find it for his sermon.

But given a man or

woman who believes in human goodness heartily, and life seems to organize itself into a conspiracy about them to sustain their cheerful faith. For them there are no bearers of ill tidings. All their friends are like the sparrow that the Greek orator saw midway of his oration, and stopped to say, "I see in the court-yard a sparrow that has seen a slave spilling a sack of corn, and he has gone to tell his fellows." Sure enough he had, and back he came with them to riot in the bounteous store. Such hearers of good tidings are not few. Goodness attracts goodness, kindness attracts kindness, love attracts love. Attracts! It does more than that. It creates it, teases it from what seems the most reluctant soil. I have read a story * of a man who was a potter, and who had a wee lad at home, who was frail and sick and never likely to get well. And every night he carried home to him some pretty little thing,- a bit of colored glass, perhaps a flower, anything bright and cheerful that could lie on the white counterpane in the narrow room, and help to wear away the long and tedious days. Pretty soon the other workmen in the shop got wind of what was going on, and they were not going to be left out. They made little jars and cups, and stuck them in the corners of the kiln at baking time; and, when these had been taken out and cooled, they put them in the poor man's hat or somewhere where he would know that they were meant for him to take and carry home. They did the same with pictures and with flowers. Not a day went by without some token of their silent sympathy. For it was silent, for the most part, on both sides. The wee lad's father was a man of few words; and, even when the others took a little of their leisure to do something that would shorten his day's work, so that he might have more time at home, he hadn't much to say. And he had still less, and yet enough, one day, to tell them that

as

*In the volume of Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch's beautiful discourses, where it is given 'cut from a paper"; but the form, I think, which I have not followed closely, is Mr. McCulloch's. His book, "The Open Door," should have a hundred readers where it has but one.

the little boy was dead; and when, a day or two later, the bell tolled for the funeral, just around the corner from the shabby door there were a hundred of the workmen, all in their best clothes, waiting till the tiny coffin was brought out, and then falling into line and walking to the grave. It cost them a half day's work to do this gentle office; but when did ever poor men stand upon a thing like that? And so again it was fulfilled as it is written, "A little child shall lead them."

And now do you know that in such a story as this which I have told it seems to me we have in little all the sphere of human life. The whole round world is but a pottery in which some workman always has a wee lad" sick, or a poor wife ailing and broken, or some other trouble; and, given a faithful, loving heart, the gravitation of the planets is not surer than that sympathy and love and help will gravitate to it, and, so doing, build up the man or woman to whom such things come into a sweeter faith, a nobler purpose, and a better life. Human nature and human life, in general, is for the most of us only our personal experience of human nature and of human life writ large; and men's faith in God is generally much or little in proportion to their faith in human kind. Supposing any one could have made the poor man of my story understand the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, do you imagine that he could have been made to believe it? I do not. Nor the atheism of some others. This is the true revelation of the Father in the Son of which we hear so much,— the revelation of the divine in the human. Only thank God, and thank a multitude of men and women that no man can number, that the revelation is not confined to one Son of God who lived and loved and taught and died in far-away Judea eighteen centuries ago, and that he was not even the first-born of many brethren, seeing that thousands before him had shown little or much of the Eternal Goodness, and men and women had rejoiced to see their day. And when, as now often happens, well-meaning persons tell us, "Yes,