1892 'AN APOLOGETIC IRENICON ' 217 



do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your 

 own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, con- 

 clusions, the value of which you ought to have tested for 

 yourself. 



Again, replying to the reproach that all his public 

 utterances had been of a negative character, that the 

 great problems of human life had been entirely left 

 out of his purview, he defends once more the work 

 of the man who clears the ground for the builders to 

 come after him : — 



There is endless backwoodsman's work yet to be done 

 If " those also serve who only stand and wait," still more 

 do those who sweep and cleanse ; and if any man elect to 

 give his strength to the weeder's and scavengers occupa- 

 tion, I remain of the opinion that his service should be 

 counted acceptable, and that no one has a right to ask 

 more of him than faithful performance of the duties 

 he has undertaken. I venture to count it an improbable 

 suggestion that any such person — a man, let us say, who 

 has well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and 

 has graduated in all the faculties of human relationships ; 

 who has taken his share in all the deep joys and deeper 

 anxieties which cling about them ; who has felt the 

 burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has stood 

 alone with his dead before the abyss of the eternal — has 

 never had a thought beyond negative criticism. It seems 

 to me incredilsle that such an one can have done his day^s 

 work, always with a light heart, with no sense of respon- 

 sibility, no terror of that which may appear when the 

 factitious veil of Isis — the thick web of fiction man has 

 woven round nature — is stripped oflf. 



Challenged to state his " mental bias, pro or am" 

 with regard to such matters as Creation, Providence, 



