hilosopher was to subject its principles to a code of laws, in the
observation of which the merit of the speaker, thinker, or worker, in
or on that subject, was thereafter to consist; so that the whole mind of
the world was occupied by the exclusive study of Restraints. The sound
of the forging of fetters was heard from sea to sea. The doctors of all
the arts and sciences set themselves daily to the invention of new
varieties of cages and manacles; they themselves wore, instead of gowns,
a chain mail, whose purpose was not so much to avert the weapon of the
adversary as to restrain the motions of the wearer; and all the acts,
thoughts, and workings of mankind,--poetry, painting, architecture, and
philosophy,--were reduced by them merely to so many different forms of
fetter-dance.

Sec. LXXXVII. Now, I am very sure that no reader who has given any
attention to the former portions of this work, or the tendency of what
else I have written, more especially the last chapter of the "Seven
Lamps," will suppose me to underrate the importance, or dispute the
authority, of law. It has been necessary for me to allege these again
and again, nor can they ever be too often or too energetically alleged,
against the vast masses of men who now disturb or retard the advance of
civilization; heady and high-minded, despisers of discipline, and
refusers of correction. But law, so far as it can be reduced to form and
system, and is not written upon the heart,--as it is, in a Divine
loyalty, upon the hearts of the great hierarchies who serve and wait
about the throne of the Eternal Lawgiver,--this lower and formally
expressible law has, I say, two objects. It is either for the definition
and restraint of sin, or the guidance of simplicity; it either explains,
forbids, and punishes wickedness, or it guides the movements and actions
both of lifeless things and of the more simple and untaught among
responsible agents. And so long, therefore, as sin and foolishness are
in the world, so long it will be necessary for men to submit themselves
painfully to this lower law, in proportion to their need of being
corrected, and to the degree of childishness or simplicity by which they
approach more nearly to the condition of the unthinking and inanimate
things which are governed by law altogether; yet yielding, in the manner
of their submission to it, a singular lesson to the pride of
man,--being obedient more perfectly in proportion to their
greatness.[2