sm of parties.

57. Take the instinct for justice, and the natural sense of
indignation against crime; let the Devil color it with personal
passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men
living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of
their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a
gravestone. Take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which
are the source of every true achievement in art; let the Devil touch
them with sensuality, and they are stronger than the sword or the
flame to blast the cities where they were born, into ruin without
hope. Take the instinct of industry and ardor of commerce, which are
meant to be the support and mutual maintenance of man; let the Devil
touch them with avarice, and you shall see the avenues of the exchange
choked with corpses that have died of famine.

58. Now observe--I leave you to call this deceiving spirit what you
like--or to theorize about it as you like. All that I desire you to
recognize is the fact of its being here, and the need of its being
fought with. If you take the Bible's account of it, or Dante's, or
Milton's, you will receive the image of it as a mighty spiritual
creature, commanding others, and resisted by others: if you take
AEschylus's or Hesiod's account of it, you will hold it for a partly
elementary and unconscious adversity of fate, and partly for a group
of monstrous spiritual agencies connected with death, and begotten out
of the dust; if you take a modern rationalist's, you will accept it
for a mere treachery and want of vitality in our own moral nature
exposing it to loathsomeness or moral disease, as the body is capable
of mortification or leprosy. I do not care what you call it,--whose
history you believe of it,--nor what you yourself can imagine about
it; the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the
deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us,
and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly
reality, I say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real.
Unbelievable,--_those_,--unless you had seen them; no fable could have
been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor
material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent--working its way sidelong
in the sand. As real, but with sting of eternal death--this worm that
dies not, and fire that is not quenched, within our souls or around
them. Eternal death, I say--sure, t