tholic, Jew or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing in
the intellectual life of the race. If the world had been wholly peopled
with such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would have been a
creed like that of Christendom.

I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in
this point at least, that a true man's allegiance is given to that which
is highest in his own nature. He reverences truth, he loves kindness,
he respects justice. The two first qualities he understands well enough.
But the last, justice, at least as between the Infinite and the
finite, has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and
diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti
who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations,
that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever
as a human conception.

As for power, we are outgrowing all superstition about that. We have not
the slightest respect for it as such, and it is just as well to remember
this in all our spiritual adjustments. We fear power when we cannot
master it; but just as far as we can master it, we make a slave and a
beast of burden of it without hesitation. We cannot change the ebb and
flow of the tides, or the course of the seasons, but we come as near it
as we can. We dam out the ocean, we make roses bloom in winter and water
freeze in summer. We have no more reverence for the sun than we have for
a fish-tail gas-burner; we stare into his face with telescopes as at a
ballet-dancer with opera-glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms
as if they were so many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not
want his company and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant. The gods
of the old heathen are the servants of to-day. Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus,
and the bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their
pedestals and put on our livery. We cannot always master them, neither
can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle
on the wildest natural agencies. The mob of elemental forces is as noisy
and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it
well under, except for an occasional outbreak.

When I read the Lady's letter printed some time since, I could not
help honoring the feeling which prompted her in writing it. But while I
respect the innocent incapacity of tender age and the limitations of the
comparat