ing as moral truth--any
such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,
'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay
no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly
follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of
vice.

Certain virtues--temperance, industry, and things within reasonable
limits--command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly
lead to ruin.

But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense
selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of
human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love
of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no
tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even
necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,
the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.
High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and
the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for
ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he
becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you
may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being
particularly happy.

If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and
contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is,
decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest
will not come out of him.

Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call
reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world
at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.
Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social
convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct
for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is
completely resolved into that.

True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to
find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of
honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in
serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is
the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The
Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets
or denies the nobler principles of