her of 'em gone!"

We have heard of a man who had conceived a violent eccentric prejudice
against negroes; and he was not content with chiming in with the usual
cant of the prejudice that they ought not to be allowed in our churches
and in our rail-road-cars, but vociferated, that, if he had his way,
they should not be allowed in Africa! The advantage of grit in this
respect is in its annihilating a prejudice by presenting a vivid vision
of its theoretical consequences. Carlyle has an eccentric hatred of the
eighteenth century, its manners, morals, politics, religion, and men. He
has expressed this in various ways for thirty years; but in his last
work, the "Life of Frederick the Great," his prejudice reached its
logical climax in the assertion, that the only sensible thing the
eighteenth century ever did was blowing out its own brains in the French
Revolution.

Again, in discussion, some men have felicity in replying to a question,
others a felicity in replying to the motive which prompted the question.
In one case you get an answer addressed to your understanding; in the
other, an answer which smites like a slap in the face. Thus, when a pert
skeptic asked Martin Luther where God was before He created heaven,
Martin stunned his querist with the retort,--"He was building hell for
such idle, presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you."
And everybody will recollect the story of the self-complacent cardinal
who went to confess to a holy monk, and thought by self-accusation to
get the reputation of a saint.

"I have been guilty of every kind of sin," snivelled the cardinal.

"It is a solemn fact," replied the impassive monk.

"I have indulged in pride, ambition, malice, and revenge," groaned the
cardinal.

"It is too true," answered the monk.

"Why, you fool," exclaimed the enraged dignitary, "you don't imagine
that I mean all this to the letter!"

"Ho! ho!" said the monk, "so you have been a liar, too, have you?"

This relentless rebuker of shams furnishes us with a good transition to
another department of the subject, namely, moral hardihood, or grit
organized in conscience, and applying the most rigorous laws of ethics
to the practical affairs of life. Now there is a wide difference between
moral men, so called, and men moralized,--between men who lazily adopt
and lazily practise the conventional moral proprieties of the time, and
men transformed into the image of inexorable, unmerciful moral ide