deliberate resistance to the
law of oneness, to that integration which is so conspicuous in Nature.
We are incessantly seeking to take the one half and leave the other,
and straightway Nemesis overtakes us. We want to enjoy the pleasures
of sense without attending to the inexorable requirements of mind, and
such an appalling satiety sickens our souls, that we forget ourselves
in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade
ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of
the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our
unspeakable _ennui_. We would have the half, while Nature planned the
whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so
appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them
under the image of a fire which will not be quenched, a worm of remorse
which can never die--an immense despair for which there is no relief.

Life is full of distressing illustrations of this ethical law. A man
who owns but the clothes he wears one day, is a millionaire the next,
and he attempts the impossible task of bisecting life, which has been
manifestly planned as a whole. He appears to succeed for a time, but
one day men are startled to hear that he has owned up that he had
chosen the wrong path, and has determined to quit it in suicide. A few
months after, the community is compelled to witness an almost
unparalleled degradation, that of a young man born in the purple, with
every advantage that birth, position, education or matrimonial
connections could give him, sentenced as a felon for the meanest
treachery, because he would halve life which was planned a whole, and
forgot the Fates, the dread Erynys, who administer the ethical law of
compensation.

But it is the same in lesser as in greater things. Without hesitation,
we may ascribe our minor sorrows to the one self-same source, the
attempt to dissever the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual
bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. We
forget that purity of heart and the law of gravitation arise in the
same eternal spring, that the world is a whole, that moral and physical
are grounded in one source, and we pay the penalty. "The soul says
eat; the body would feast. The soul says the man and woman shall be
one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul
says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body
woul