forego an opportunity of delivering, or rather inflicting, a speech upon whomsoever they could get to listen to it,) we think they ought of right, and also as a matter of policy, to be transmitted to the Deaf and Dumb| Asylum of Pennsylvania, or divided among any similar institutions that may exist elsewhere. The disposal or division of the money in this way, would, we think, be happily calculated to produce a two-fold moral effect, by operating as a check and lesson to those who talk too much, and a support and encouragement to those who do not talk at all. That I may not, Mr. Editor, fall into the fault I have been reprehending, and become tedious and long-winded, I will here conclude, for the present, these rather hasty and very desultory remarks. ATHENIAN. THE SHORE. COMPANION of my soul, though years Forever lost! thou'rt ever near, I wander by the sounding shore, O loved and lost, I thought thee near; Proud swell the waves, then sadly fall, Of sweetest words they mournful tell, Deep sunk in heaven's o'er-arching cope, No form was there to dash our folly ; While now the wave reclining near, Love born of Silence ! faintly tell But then the impassioned element, Now wearisome these ocean noises, While gazing on the rising waves, Thy foot-prints on the sliding strand, So fails my life, 'twixt doubt and strife, The sea still gaining on the shores, "WOMAN'S RIGHTS." length it gains in man the summit and crown, towards which it has been evidently reaching and tending from the start. So, in the first chapter of Genesis, we have the process of creation described in this very order, and all conducted to its magnificent conclusion, finally, only towards the close of the sixth day, in that THERE are two great conceptions, very generally altogether overlooked, which it is all important to hold in full view, in our efforts to understand and interpret the mighty problem of human life. In the first place, this life, while it culminates and becomes complete only in the form of morality or spirit, has its root always in the sphere of nature, and can never dis-oracle of infinite majesty and love: "Let engage itself entirely from its power; in the second place, while it reveals itself perpetually through single individuals, it is nevertheless throughout an organic process, which necessarily includes the universal race, as a living whole, from its origin to its end. Nature, of course, can never be truly and strictly the mother of mind. The theory of an actual inward development of man's life, out of the life of the world below him, as presented, for instance, in the little work entitled "Vestiges of Creation," is entitled to no sort of attention or respect. The plant can, by no possibility, creep upwards into the region of sensation; and just as little may we conceive of a transition, on the part of the mere animal, over into the world of self-conscious intelligence and will. The sundering gulf is just as deep and impassable in the one case as it is in the other. But we must not so understand this, as to lose sight at the same time of the mysterious life-union which holds notwithstanding between nature and mind. The world, in its lower view, is not simply the outward theatre or stage on which man is called to act his part, as a candidate for heaven. In the midst of all its different forms of existence, it is pervaded throughout with the power of a single life, which comes ultimately to its full sense and force only in the human person. This should be plain to the most common observation. Nature is constructed, or we should say, rather exists, on the plan of a vast pyramid; which starts in the mass of inorganic matter and rises steadily through successive stages of organization, first vegetable and then animal, till at us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every moving thing that moveth upon the earth." Man is the centre of nature, without which it could not be in any of its parts the living constitution which it is in fact; for the parts in this case subsist not by themselves, or for themselves simply, but in virtue only of their organic comprehension in the whole. Nature, of course, then rests in man as her own universal sense and end, and can never be disjoined from his life. The union is not outward simply, but inward and vital. Man carries in himself the full mystery of the material world, and remains from first to last the organ of its power. He is, indeed, in another view, far more than nature. dom, as they meet together in the idea of personality, belong to a wholly different order of existence; in virtue of which, he towers high above the whole surrounding world, as the immediate representative and vicegerent of God in its midst; made in the image and after the likeness of his glorious Maker, as we are told, and for this reason clothed with supremacy over the entire inferior creation. But still, in all this dignity, his native affinity with this creation is not in the least impaired or broken. Nature clings to him still, as the noblest fruit of her own womb, in whose mysterious presence is fulfilled the last prophetic sense of her whole previous life, while at the same time this is made to pass away in something quite beyond itself. His personality, with all its world-trans Reason and free cending, heaven-climbing powers, remains | rooted to the earth, conditioned at every point by the material soil from which it has sprung, and reflecting in clear image the outward life which has become etherealized in its constitution. The process of nature is thus rising upwards perpetually into the process of morality, by which in the end the problem of the world is to become complete in the history of man. The first is the necessary basis and support of the second, as truly as the stock is made to carry the flower in which it passes away. Man is the efflorescence of nature, the full bursting forth of her inmost sense and endeavor, into the form of intelligence and will; and his whole thinking and working consequently can be sound and solid, only as they are in fact borne and carried by a growth that springs immediately from her womb. There is no opposition then, as is sometimes dreamed, between the natural and the moral. They are, indeed, widely different, but not in such a way as to contradict each other. On the contrary, they can never be rightly sundered or disjoined. Nature, in order that it may be true to itself, must ascend into the sphere of morality; and morality, on the other hand, can have no truth or substance, except as it is found to embody in itself the life of nature, thus emancipated into a higher form. Daughters of heaven as they all are, there is still not a single virtue which is not in this respect, at the same time, truly and fully earth-born; as much so, we may say, as its own sweet image, the natural flower, be it modest daisy or stately dahlia, that quietly blooms at its side. A morality which affects to be purely of the skies, can never be other than sickly and sentimental. The more of nature our virtues enshrine, the more vigorous will they be found to be and worthy of respect. This is one universal law in the constitution of our human life. Another presents itself, as already stated, in the conception of an organic process, in virtue of which the problem of every individual life is, from the start, involved in the problem that includes humanity as a whole. Morality, by its very nature, is something social. It does not simply require the relations which society creates, as an outward field for its action, but stands. also only in the sense of these relations as a part of its own being. The idea of man, which is of course originally one and single, in order that it may become actual, must resolve itself into an innumerable multitude of individual lives, whose perfection subsequently can be found again in no other form than that of their general union in a free way. Provision is made for such union in the natural constitution of humanity, bound together as it is by a common origin, and upheld by perpetual evolution from itself in the way of history. But mere nature here is not sufficient to secure all that is required. Humanity comes to its full sense only in the sphere of intelligence and freedom; and its proper wholeness, therefore, is something to be reached only by the activity of the will, recognizing and embracing, with full consent, the relations in which it is required to move. This again supposes a process, growing forth continually from the law of natural evolution and growth just noticed, by which the individual life, in finding itself under its higher form of self-consciousness, may be still engaged to seek its true place in the integration of life as a whole, flowing into this by the spontaneous force of love, and resting in it as the proper and necessary perfection of its own being. The unity of the race can be fully accomplished thus, only through the free action of the living elements into which it is resolved for this purpose. The process of the union is moral, and in no sense physical, except as conditioned by a natural constitution, which adumbrates and supports the spiritual structure that springs from its presence. It is possible, in such case, of course, that the freedom of the individual subject may be abused, and the law of love denied which he is bound by his nature to honor and obey. He may so cling to his own separate and single life, through selfishness and sin, as to wrong perpetually the claims of the general life in which this should become complete. But in all this he wrongs, at the same time, the inmost sense and meaning also of his own individual being. Whether he choose to make account of it or not, he is formed for morality, that is, for free inward union with his race, through the social relations in which he stands; and his life can come to no right development within itself, but must suffer rather perpetual violence in its nature, if it be not allowed to unfold itself in this its only normal and legitimate form. Morality, including, as it does, the conception of personality or the self-conscious and self-active force of reason and will, is something general and universal by its very nature. It implies throughout the idea of fellowship and union, the organic marriage of reciprocally necessary and mutually supplemental parts, working into each other and conspiring in a common whole. In the power of this universal, omnipotent and irreversible law, the life of every man stands, from the beginning, in virtue of its spiritual or moral constitution. He can never be true to himself at a single point; he can never exercise a single moral function, a single act of intelligence or will, in a truly free way, without going beyond his own person, and mingling, with conscious coalescence, in the sea of life with which he is surrounded. By one of the greatest discoveries in modern science, placing the name of Schleiermacher in the sphere of ethics on the same high level with that of Kepler in the sphere of physics, the general moral function, as it may be styled, in man, is found to resolve itself, by a process of analysis which we have no time here to follow, into four cardinal forms of action, two lying on the side of the understanding, and two on the side of the will. Each of these can hold properly only under a social character, by which the individual, in order that he may be at all complete in himself, is forced to enter into fellowship with his race. Thus arise four great spheres of moral union, in the proper constitution of the world's life. The first is exhibited to us predominantly in the idea of art; the second, in the idea of science; the third, in the idea of sociability, (geselligkeit,) corresponding very much with the conception of play, in its widest and most dignified sense; the fourth and last, in the idea of business. These four orders of life are not to be regarded, indeed, as standing wholly out of each other in the way of external distinction; the case requires, on the contrary, that they should grow into one another with inward reciprocal embrace, and it is only their complete concretion in this way at last, as the power of a single life, that can bring the moral process to its rightful conclusion. Still they are, for the most part, as the world now stands, more or less out of each other in fact; and each has a nature also of its own, which it must always be important to understand and cultivate under such separate view. They are the four grand departments of humanity, each an organism of universal power within itself, in whose organic conjunction alone we have revealed to us the full idea of morality, as the proper life of man. Not as co-ordinate in any sense with these, but as above them all, and as constituting indeed the only form in which they can become complete, stands the idea of Religion, as fully actualized in the glorious union of the One Holy Catholic Church. In one aspect we may style such a moral whole the State. But, in a perfect state of society, this idea itself must become merged in the broader and deeper idea of the Church, in which alone we reach the final and adequate expression for our universal human life. Religion of course then stands in no opposition to any of the great divisions of this life, as they have just been named; for this would imply an original contrariety between it and the actual constitution of the world, which the nature of the case must be held to exclude. On the contrary, it must have power finally to lift them all into its own sphere. Art, science, social and civil life, must all be capable of being sanctified by its transforming presence. It belongs to the very conception of Christianity and the Church thus, that they should take full possession of the world at last, not extensively alone in its outward population, but intensively also in the entire range of its inward life; and it is only in proportion as we find their actual form commensurate with the idea of such a catholicity, that this can be said to have reached, in any given stadium of their history, its true significance and design. Underneath this whole magnificent superstructure, on the other side, appears the primitive, fundamental form of society, in the constitution of the Family. As the four-fold organism of morality terminates in the idea of the Church, so it takes its start here from an organization, that may be regarded as the root of its whole pro cess, rising into view immediately from All society rests on distinction and difference. So the primary form of fellowship now mentioned, lying as it does at the ground of our universal life, is at once provided for and secured, by a radical disruption of the entire race into two great sections or halves, in the form of sex. Of all distinctions that exist in our nature, this must be held to be the most significant and profound, as entering before all others into its universal constitution, and forming the basis on the ground of which only all other relations belonging to it become possible and real. It comes into view accordingly in the first mention of man's creation; where we are told that he was made in the image and likeness of God, and at the same time under the two-fold character of male and female, as the necessary form of his perfection. His nature became complete, only when woman was taken from his side, and he was permitted to hail her bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, in the new consciousness to which he first woke by her presence. Thus radical and original in the constitution of our nature, the sexual difference must necessarily pervade, not simply a part of its being, but the whole. The life of man is indeed always a complex fact, made up of widely different forms and spheres of existence; but it is always nevertheless, in the midst of all these, a single undivided unity within itself, bound together and ruled throughout by the presence of a common principle or law. The life of the body is ever in strict union with the life of the soul; and this, on the other hand, stands wedded again to that continually, as its own proper self under an outward material form. No less intimate and necessary, in the next place, is the connection that holds between the individual natural constitution, thus inward and outward, and the proper personality of the subject to whom it belongs. It lies in the very conception of personality, it is true, being as it is the life of the spirit in the form of intelligence and will, that it should not be ruled blindly by the force of mere nature, as comprehended in the individual organization. It is a principle and fountain of action for itself, and is required to act back upon the natural life with such independent force, as may serve to mould and fashion this continually more and more into its own image. But still, this original and independent action, however free it may be in its own nature, can never escape from the particular organization in which it has its basis, and which it is called to fill with its presence. In other words, the inmost life of man, his personal spirit, though absolutely universal in its own character, is made to individualize itself by union with the inferior part of his nature, while at the same time it seeks to lift this into its own sphere. Reason and will accordingly are not the same thing exactly in all men. Personality is conditioned and complexioned, all the world over, by the individual physical nature, somatic and psychic, out of which, and by means of which, it comes to its historical development. It is not possible then, of course, that it should not participate in the force of a distinction so broad and deep as that which is involved in the idea of sex. It results necessarily from the organic unity of every single life as a whole, that the order which thus severs the human world into the two grand sections of male and female, should extend to the most spiritual part of our nature as well as to that which is simply corporeal There is a sex of the mind or soul, just as there is a sex of the body; an inward difference of structure in the one case, including the whole economy of the spirit, fancy and feeling, thought and volition, as broadly marked and strikingly significant, to say the least, as any outward difference of structure which may show itself in the other. It is altogether preposterous to think of resolving this difference into the influence of education or mere social position; as though nothing more were needed to convert men into women, or women into men, |