HIGHER LAWS. 
235 
savor of food.” He wlio distinguishes the true savor of 
his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot 
be otherwise. A puritan may go to his brown-bread 
crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to 
his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouth 
defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. 
It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devo¬ 
tion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not 
a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual 
life, but food for the worms that possess us. If the hunt¬ 
er has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such 
savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly 
made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines from over the sea, 
and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her 
preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, 
can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking. 
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never 
an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness 
is the only investment that never fails. In the music 
of the harp which trembles round the world it is the 
insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the 
travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Com¬ 
pany, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is 
all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at 
last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not 
indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sen¬ 
sitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it 
is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear 
it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the 
charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, 
go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet 
satire on the meanness of our lives. 
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens 
