ealously
careful to avoid definite precept. Is He asked, for example, to divide a
heritage? He refuses: and the best advice that He will offer is but a
paraphrase of that tenth commandment which figures so strangely among
the rest. _Take heed, and beware of covetousness._ If you complain that
this is vague, I have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.
For no definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its
truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by
the voice of God. And life is so intricate and changing, that perhaps
not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that
nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.

CHAPTER III

Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our
experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers
within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings
to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our first
surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this connection; a
few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the
blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from
several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever
conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green,
commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire
ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the
lawn. Far off on all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel
and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest
so far that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.
Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the truncheon
of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with mankind on its
bullet. Even to us who have known no other, it seems a strange, if not
an appalling, place of residence.

But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders
that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself. He
inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding, and
renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and
the freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass; his
eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and touch
and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently ponder
on his astonishi