ry is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies.
This may be taken as fixed.

And now by what method ascertain the monition of the gods in regard to
our affairs? How decipher, with best fidelity, the eternal regulation
of the Universe; and read, from amid such confused embroilments of
human clamor and folly, what the real Divine Message to us is? A divine
message, or eternal regulation of the Universe, there verily is, in
regard to every conceivable procedure and affair of man: faithfully
following this, said procedure or affair will prosper, and have the
whole Universe to second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating
contradictions, towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking
this, disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every
affair. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count heads; ask
Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell." Universal
Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well,--I perceive we have got
into strange spiritual latitudes indeed. Within the last half-century or
so, either the Universe or else the heads of men must have altered very
much. Half a century ago, and down from Father Adam's time till then,
the Universe, wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of
somewhat abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its
face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately hiding
its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere persons, and
partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number
was not the majority in my time!

Or perhaps the chief end of man being now, in these improved epochs,
to make money and spend it, his interests in the Universe have become
amazingly simplified of late; capable of being voted on with effect
by almost anybody? "To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the
dearest:" truly if that is the summary of his social duties, and the
final divine message he has to follow, we may trust him extensively
to vote upon that. But if it is not, and never was, or can be? If the
Universe will not carry on its divine bosom any commonwealth of mortals
that have no higher aim,--being still "a Temple and Hall of Doom," not
a mere Weaving-shop and Cattle-pen? If the unfathomable Universe
has decided to _reject_ Human Beavers pretending to be Men; and will
abolish, pretty rapidly perhaps, in hideous mud-deluges, their "markets"
and them, unless they think of it?--In that case it wer