PESSIMISM AND ITS ANTIDOTE. 685 



Edgar in " King Lear," and had he been left to die a maniac, would 

 that, think you, have been untrue to fact ? 



Even the one or two to whom Fate has been most propitious, a 

 Shakespeare, a Goethe, have not they too suffered from the bruises or 

 flattery of Fortune, fallen at any rate far short of the fullness and 

 balance a happier age and education might have conducted them to ? 



People are indeed fond of raising monuments and holding cente- 

 naries (to the so-called honor ! ) of great men, but do you think there is 

 any significance at the bottom of it ? Very little indeed. The fathers 

 kill the prophets, and the sons garnish their sepulchres. 



In the face of these facts and considerations how disgusting to 

 hear the universal cant about " public opinion ! " The shoemaker's 

 opinion may indeed have some value on the matter of boots, the tai- 

 lor's on that of clothes ; but what opinion can the masses, all ab- 

 sorbed in the question of simple existence, have about government 

 and education and religion ? At best they are capable of a total 

 heart-belief in names^ of dying as martyrs for names. Dean Stanley 

 admits that most of the noble martyrdoms have been in attestation 

 of peculiar combinations of letters of the alphabet. See the intellect 

 and heart of Scotland wrangling, down into the latter end of the 

 nineteenth century (and into how many later centui'ies ?), as to whether 

 little children at school shall learn how to define eflTectual callinsf and 

 distinguish between justification, adoption, and sanctification ! 



And all men shall be immortal ? Each despicable unit must needs 

 be an immortal and independent soul ? Came from God ? And God 

 sends by special appointment such swarms of immortal souls, often in 

 such questionable way, sinto the world ? And if you are really eter- 

 nal the one way, before., you must also be so the other Avay, behind? 

 What, then, of your being a thousand years ago ? And you do seem 

 to carry the air of eternity about you, sleeping and digesting and 

 pottering about nothing as you do ! Is not each individual man, 

 according to Darwin and Haeckel, but the temporary inheritor and 

 transmitter of the qualities of his ancestors, modified by the impres- 

 sions received during his own tenure of life from intercourse with 

 people, reading, etc. ? And how can the self-same life be held at one 

 and the same time by each individual successive link in an endless 

 chain, seeing the life devolves but in succession, and that each link in 

 the chain sparkles into existence and luminousness only during the 

 short term of actual possession ? 



It is no use arguing that men are left to their own free-wills, and 

 have themselves to blame for their fates, when the whole complaint is 

 simply that men have no free-wills to be left to, but are total slaves. 

 And yet not a poor devil desecrating the earth but, under very possi- 

 ble circumstances, through a kinder providence and better influences, 

 might have been saved in the first place from being born a devil. 

 Where, then, is the moral government of the world, the ideal tendency 



