he Cause. They share his reliance, and accept in
simplicity those brotherly words in which he extends his privilege to
every child.

He will open to us Nature, for his habit is the only natural. He has no
anxiety for immediate results, is never guarded in expression, does
never explain; he makes no record of thought, calls no scholar to be
scribe; he knows no labors, no studies; he walks on the hills, and
frankly interprets the waving grain, the seed in the furrow, the lily,
and the weed. Here is power which takes no thought for the morrow, an
attitude which works endless revolutions without means or care or cost.

We must not dwell on this supreme example, lest we leave the hope of
every reader far behind. Let us rather keep the level of common
experience, and disclose the incursions of spirit which light a humble
life. Love and Providence will appear in every breast; nothing more than
Love and Providence appears to us above.

A supreme genius will fail, rather by under- than over-statement, to
balance the popular exaggeration and repetition of fine phrases for
which we have no corresponding fact. Why should any man be zealous or
impatient? Why press a moral, dissecting it skeleton-like from throbbing
textures of Freedom and Beauty? Why preach, threaten, and drive us with
these bones, when a lover may draw us with kisses on living lips? Nature
offers Duty as a manlier pleasure, leads the will so softly as to set us
free in following, and her last thrill of delight is the steady
heart-beat of heroism, facing danger with level eyes and fatal
determination. Fear may arrest, but never restore. It is an arrest of
fever by freezing, of disease by disease. Let it be understood, once for
all, that this universe is moral, and say no more about that. Every man
loves goodness, and the saint never exhorts to this love, but reinforces
by addressing himself to it as matter of course. All power is a like
repose on the basis of common desires and perceptions in the race. The
didactic method is an insult alike to the pupil and the universe.
Socrates is master and gentleman with his questions, suggestions,
seeking in me and acting as midwife to my thought; but all _illuminati_
and professors, all who talk down or cut our meat into morsels, will
quickly be counted aunties by the vigorous boys at school. Chairs and
pulpits totter to-day with a scholastic dry rot, which is inability to
recognize the equality of unsophisticated man to man