nderstanding,
faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like
light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures on the rim of the
horizon and elsewhere. Truly this same sense of the infinite nature of
duty, is the central part of all within us; a ray as of eternity and
immortality immured in dusky many-coloured Time, and its deaths and
births. Your coloured glass varies so much from century to century--and
in certain money-making, game-preserving centuries, it gets terribly
opaque. Not a heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of
vacant, leaden, cold hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque,
this coloured glass; now, may it not become at once translucent and
uncoloured? Painting no pictures more for us, but only the everlasting
azure itself. That will be a right glorious consummation." If it were
only the painting pictures! but we act the painted scenes. And strange
they are, and of diversity enough. It was the confession of an apostle,
that he "thought with himself that he ought to do many things contrary"
to his master. There are national consciences how unlike each other;
there are consciences of tribes and guilds, which, strange to say,
though they be composed of individuals, bear not the stamp of any one
individual conscience among them. They apologise to themselves for
iniquity by a division and subdivision of the responsibility; and thus,
by each owning to but a little share collectively, they commit a great
enormity. It is the whole and sole responsibility of the individual,
responsibility to that inner arbiter sitting _foro conscientiae_, and the
sight of those frowning attendants of the court, Nemesis and Adraste,
ready with the scourge to follow crime, that keep the man honest. Put
not confidence, Eusebius, in bodies, in guilds, and committees. Trust
not to them property or person; they may be all individually good
Samaritans, but collectively they will rather change places with the
thieves than bind up your wounds. In this matter, "Experto crede
Roberto."

But of this diversity.--The Turk will split his sides with laughter,
against the very nature, too, of his Turkish gravity, should he witness
the remorse of the subdued polygamist. We read of nations who, from a
sense of duty, eat their parents, and would shudder at the crime of
burying them in the earth, or burning them. So is there a cannibalism of
love as well as of hatred. Sinbad's terror at the duty of being b