doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is
the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he
always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks
authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.
It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme
self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his
proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.

"Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the
common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a
task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is
to others!"

"Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be
praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from
a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that
judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful,
and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John
Bunyan's view:--

"A Christian man is never long at ease,
When one fright's gone, another doth him seize."

Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and
trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble
scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which
would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.

The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:--

"As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as
there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect
virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every
action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in
God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul
incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some
Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour
floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and
scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top
and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms;
until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some
other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and
head of all living nature."

Th