oss-houses, temples sacred or other, everywhere spread
over the world, we hear some dim mumblement of an assertion that such is
still, what it was always and will forever be, the fact: but meseems
it has terribly fallen out of memory nevertheless; and, from Dan to
Beersheba, one in vain looks out for a man that really in his heart
believes it. In his heart he believes, as we perceive, that scrip will
yield dividends: but that Heaven too has an office of account, and
unerringly marks down, against us or for us, whatsoever thing we do
or say or think, and treasures up the same in regard to every
creature,--this I do not so well perceive that he believes. Poor
blockhead, no: he reckons that all payment is in money, or approximately
representable by money; finds money go a strange course; disbelieves the
parson and his Day of Judgment; discerns not that there is any judgment
except in the small or big debt court; and lives (for the present) on
that strange footing in this Universe. The unhappy mortal, what is
the use of his "civilizations" and his "useful knowledges," if he have
forgotten that beginning of human knowledge; the earliest perception
of the awakened human soul in this world; the first dictate of Heaven's
inspiration to all men? I cannot account him a man any more; but only
a kind of human beaver, who has acquired the art of ciphering. He lives
without rushing hourly towards suicide, because his soul, with all
its noble aspirations and imaginations, is sunk at the bottom of his
stomach, and lies torpid there, unaspiring, unimagining, unconsidering,
as if it were the vital principle of a mere _four_-footed beaver. A soul
of a man, appointed for spinning cotton and making money, or, alas,
for merely shooting grouse and gathering rent; to whom Eternity and
Immortality, and all human Noblenesses and divine Facts that did not
tell upon the stock-exchange, were meaningless fables, empty as the
inarticulate wind. He will recover out of that persuasion one day, or be
ground to powder, I believe!--

To such a pass, by our beaverisms and our mammonisms; by canting of
"prevenient grace" everywhere, and so boarding and lodging our poor
souls upon supervenient moonshine everywhere, for centuries long; by our
sordid stupidities and our idle babblings; through faith in the divine
Stump-orator, and Constitutional Palaver, or august Sanhedrim of
Orators,--have men and Nations been reduced, in this sad epoch! I
cannot call them h