y kindness done; that we should regard friendship
as being actuated by selfish motives; that we should never praise when
praise seems to be deserved. In fact, when Sir Walter Scott long ago made
a partial translation of the "Havamal," he thought himself obliged to
leave out a number of sentences which seemed to him highly immoral, and to
apologize for others. He thought that they would shock English readers too
much.

We are not quite so squeamish to-day; and a thinker of our own time would
scarcely deny that English society is very largely governed at this moment
by the same kind of rules that Sir Walter Scott thought to be so bad. But
here we need not condemn English society in particular. All European
society has been for hundreds of years conducting itself upon very much
the same principles; for the reason that human social experience has been
the same in all Western countries. I should say that the only difference
between English society and other societies is that the hardness of
character is very much greater. Let us go back even to the most Christian
times of Western societies in the most Christian country of Europe, and
observe whether the social code was then and there so very different from
the social code of the old "Havamal." Mr. Spencer observes in his "Ethics"
that, so far as the conduct of life is concerned, religion is almost
nothing and practice is everything. We find this wonderfully exemplified
in a most remarkable book of social precepts written in the seventeenth
century, in Spain, under the title of the "Oraculo Manual." It was
composed by a Spanish priest, named Baltasar Gracian, who was born in the
year 1601 and died in 1658; and it has been translated into nearly all
languages. The best English translation, published by Macmillan, is called
"The Art of Worldly Wisdom." It is even more admired to-day than in the
seventeenth century; and what it teaches as to social conduct holds as
good to-day of modern society as it did of society two hundred years ago.
It is one of the most unpleasant and yet interesting books ever
published--unpleasant because of the malicious cunning which it often
displays--interesting because of the frightful perspicacity of the author.
The man who wrote that book understood the hearts of men, especially the
bad side. He was a gentleman of high rank before he became a priest, and
his instinctive shrewdness must have been hereditary. Religion, this man
would have said, teach