nce make tolerable
immedicable ills. He feels no self-complacency, but rather the
self-dissatisfaction which comes of the consciousness of possessing
faculties which he can but imperfectly use. And this discontent he
believes to be the infinite God stirring within the soul. As the
earthquake which swallows some island in another hemisphere disturbs not
the even tenor of our way, so the passions of men whose world is other
than his, who dwell remote from what he contemplates and loves, shake
not his tranquil mind. While they threaten and pursue, his thought moves
in spheres unknown to them. He knows how little life at the best can
give, and is not hard to console for the loss of anything. There is no
true thought which he would not gladly make his own, even though it
should be the watchword of his enemies. Since morality is practical
truth, he understands that increasing knowledge will make it at once
more evident and more attractive. Hatred between races and nations he
holds to be not less unchristian than the hatred which arms the
individual against his fellow-man. It is impossible for him to be a
scoffer; for whatever has strengthened or consoled a human soul is
sacred in his eyes; and wherever there is question of what is socially
complex, as of a religion or a civilization, there is question of many
human lives, their hopes, their joys, their strivings, their yearnings,
disappointments, agonies, and deaths; and he is able to perceive that in
the ports of levity there is no refuge for hearts that mourn. Does not
love itself, in its heaven of bliss, turn away from him who mocks? The
lover of the intellectual life knows neither contempt nor indignation,
is not elated by success or cast down by failure; money cannot make him
rich, and poverty helps to make him free. His own experience teaches him
that men in becoming wiser will become nobler and happier; and this
sweet truth has in his eyes almost the elements of a religion. With
growing knowledge his power of sympathy is enlarged; until like Saint
Francis, he can call the sun his brother and the moon his sister; can
grieve with homeless winds, and feel a kinship with the clod. The very
agonies by which his soul has been wrung open to his gaze visions of
truth which else he had never caught, and so he finds even in things
evil some touch of goodness. Praise and blame are for children, but to
him impertinent. He is tolerant of absurdity because it is so
all-pervading that