of life and lived without a knowledge of good by evil. All along, nature has kept pace with his progress, changed with his changes, grown with his growth, answered every question he knew how to ask, and at last put her hand in his as his helpmeet, the very bride of his spirit.

Is it any wonder, then, that he talks of her beauty and longs for her communion-transformed as she is by his spirit into his spirit's counterpart? But such nature is no longer natural; she is everywhere scenic. None but the civilized eye can behold her charm; only for the civilized eye does it exist. For, nature's beauty is not soil, or wood, or water, or sky-fog, or any aggregate and mass of these, but rather the cosmic soul which blends and animates them as its own features, fairest to man, whose moods they reflect, when man is in his supreme moments of vision. Hence man's art tries to detain such transitory moments, and fix them in eternal forms of painting and poetry and music, creating, as it were, a nature above nature, whose beauty is his very dream of perfection, his very passion for eternity.

I speak of man as an individual because in his gradual self-idealization the individual impersonates the Race. Man is individuated by the amount of society his consciousness contains, and socialized by the largeness of his individuality. Society gives to each man the energy of his whole generation, and to every generation the triumphs of all its predecessors. All the past wars, migrations, systems of jurisprudence, literatures, arts, philosophies, religions, of mankind are hoarded and mixed in every soul of

modern Society. My homeliest speech is poetic with reminiscences of ancestral myths. I speculate about good and evil in the very terms of light and darkness which Persian fire - worship gave them. Citizenship has yet in my respect the glory which apotheosized it in Periclean Athens. The Roman forum is still astir in the civil law which I plead for my rights as a free man. The temple of Jerusalem stands anew in my heart with its golden vessels and silver trumpets, its altar, its candlestick, its holy of holies, which is the inmost "me" where God and I are one. It is my own biography I read in the world's history. Take away its achievements, and you take the breath from my nostrils. I cannot even criticise it except by the reason it has formed in my reason, so that my criticism, if just, would be its own selfcriticism for self-amendment. I am my conscious self only so far as I know its deeds and will its aims.

Should I assert the rights of absolute self-will, the assertion would challenge all other self-wills to a contest whose odds were a million to one against me. Self-will abolishes law, and with law obligation, and with obligation fidelity. It has to suspect friendship. It cannot trust its own partners in crime - crime being no more scrupulous about private contracts than about public interests. In such plight it would shrink ere long from darkness as if every shadow hid an assassin, and would dread daylight as detection.

Wiser selfhood did He enjoin who said: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Not less, nor more, nor even as much, but as thyself, for thyself he is, thine

other, yet very self. Thou certainly canst not love him more by loving thyself less, or much by loving thyself little. Pauperize him not with thine alms nor insult him with thy condescensions. Wilt thou pauperize and insult thyself? Serve him wisely by doing well the work that is before thee. Get wealth, power, knowledge, fame, character. They shall be his as well as thine. Enrich, greaten, beautify his manhood with thine own, for, his and thine are one. Make sure of this, whatever else thou doubtest: let the one mind in him and thee think it, and the one heart feel it, and social reforms will be the inevitable rebirths of a common life, a common destiny.

So far civilization has come. I have no supermundane culture that entitles me to say that it might have come farther or by a better path. I have no science of might-have-beens or may-bes. The real world is my world, both real and ideal. Man, the social man, man in the large, as he is to-day,—is the ideal man as the ideal man ought to be at his present stage of realizing himself. The ideal man must not unidealize himself by a premature forcing of growth to abortions and monstrosities. It were as bad to bring the future too soon as to hold the past too late. Gray-headed boyhood would be but another name for puerile age. Where shall to-morrow be save in to-day, which rolls toward it, which forefeels its advent, which is all alive with its import as its own, to-day being itself the morrow of yesterday? And where the morrow of all morrows except in the day of all days, the millennium that has always been coming, and therefore has always come; the perfec

tion of man by due and proper, though slow and sometimes wearisome, process of growth-perfect root to become perfect stem, perfect stem to become perfect rose, even the "White Rose of Paradise." Sing it, O Soul, as thy Jubilate,

"God 's in His heaven

All 's right with the world";

or truer, gladder still:

"God 's in His world

All 's right with the heaven."

HE hoe-man works to eat and eats to work.

"THE His task is never done. Its ends are only its

means.

It rests but to renew its toil. Its health and strength have no sense of frolic, being always yoked like an ox's for work. Round and round goes the wheel without any forward motion—a millwheel, not the wheel of a chariot, and the mill a tread-mill as if the worker were a convict under a social curse."

Now is this true? Is labor bondage because it is labor? Would the "hoe" man be better off, a manlier man, if he did not have to dig? Does his hoe symbolize a loss of opportunity, privilege, power? Would he gain these by throwing it away and becoming the vagabond and beggar he must needs be so long as he lacks the faculty which alone makes opportunity opportunity, privilege privilege, and which, by right use of both, turns them into power? And if he is to get such faculty by education, and not by a sort of divinely irresponsible inspiration, who shall educate him except Society,