lest rules of diet
and regimen, I had the happiness of seeing the child in a few days out
of danger, and of receiving the mother's rapturous thanks. That moment,
gave me the first gleam of happiness I had known for months, and
disposed me to listen to the entreaties of the poor creatures who came
from far and near to entreat the aid of the Doctor, as they persisted in
calling me, notwithstanding my repeated assurances that I had no right
to the title. I spent weeks in that neighborhood, and there I was born
to a new life. Till that time I had lived to myself, and when that in
which I had centered my earthly joy was snatched from me by death, I had
felt that life had nothing left for me; but now I saw that while there
were sentient beings in the universe to serve, and a glorious and ever
blessed Father presiding over that universe and smiling on such service,
life could not be divested of joy. Under the influence of such views my
plans for the future were formed, nor have I ever seen reason to change
or to regret them. Every where the Christian religion teaches the same
precepts, but not every where is it equally easy to see the way in which
those precepts may be obeyed; every where it is true, as a distinguished
writer of your own land has said, 'Blessed is the man who has found his
work--let him seek no other blessedness;' but not every where is it
equally easy to see where our work lies. Here, in America, the
partition-walls which stand elsewhere as a remnant of the old feudalism,
have been broken down; every man is irresistibly pressed into contact
with his neighbors--he cannot shut his eyes to their wants--he cannot
stop his ears against their cries. In America, too, every man, as I have
already said, must be a worker--or, if he live an idler, it must be on
that which his father gained by the sweat of his brow, and he leaves his
children to enslaving toil, or more enslaving dependence. Here the man
of pleasure, the idler of either sex, is a foreign exotic which finds no
nourishment in our soil, no shelter from our institutions--which is out
of harmony with our social life, and must ever be marked by the innate
vulgarity of unsustained pretension. Therefore it is comparatively easy
for us to hold out the hand of love to our brethren, sinking and
suffering at our very side, and to teach them that there is no natural
inalienable connection between labor and coarseness, ignorance and
servility; that man, though compelled