as looking for an honest work to make an honest
living, and the first place, God's Providence, brought me, was a stable;
and what a big stable that was. I never knew anything about stables and
horses: what could I do there? Instantly my feet began to move backwards
when a thought came as a lightning: what do you care if it is a stable,
or a dowager's palace? It is work that you want, and it is much more
honorable to work in a stable and be right with God, than to live in the
luxuries as a High Priest and be an hypocrite. Labor, it has always been
an object of my admiration, though, labor is set forth as a part of the
primeval curse, "in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread" and
doubtless there is a view of labor which exhibits in it reality as a
heavy, sometimes a crueling burden. But labor is by no means exclusively
an evil, nor is its prosecution a dishonor.

These impressions, false though they are, have wrought a vast and
complicated amount of harm to men, especially to the industrious
classes, causing these classes, that is, the great majority of our
fellow-creatures, to be regarded, and consequently to be treated even in
Christian lands, as a parish caste, as hereditary "hewers of wood and
drawers of water" doomed by Providence, if not primarily by the Creator
himself, to a low and degrading yoke, and utterly incapable of
entertaining lofty sentiments, or rising to a higher position; to be
restrained therefore in every manifestation of impatience lest they
should temporarily gain the upper hand, and lay waste the fair fields of
civilization; and to be kept under for the safety of society, if not for
their own safety, by social burdens and the depressing influences of
disregard and contempt.

A better feeling, however, regarding labor and laborers, is beginning to
prevail: these motions, which breathe the very spirit of slavery whence
they are borrowed, are in a word dishonored, while they are gradually
losing their hold on the heart, and their influence on the life.
Individuals arising from time to time from the lowest levels of social
life to take, occupy, and adorn its loftiest posts, have irresistibly
shown that there is no depression in society which the favors of God may
not reach. Especially has a wider and more humane spirit begun to
prevail since man has learned more accurately to know, and more
powerfully to feel, the genius and the spirit of the Gospel, whose
originator was a carpenter's son, and