stian Church; a most natural
and even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was
itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every
species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has
not known those things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they
have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and
go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins,
and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business;--nor an
honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had
made it honored of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of
it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being
poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit,
that success of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at. Pride,
vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as
in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,--to be,
with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing
worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than
Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same "best possible
organization" as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important
element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual
Heroes, were still _then_, as they now are, a kind of "involuntary
monastic order;" bound still to this same ugly Poverty,--till they had
tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for
them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know
the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, when
it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the
fit assigner of them, all settled,--how is the Burns to be recognized
that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself.
_This_ ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary
Life: this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea
that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper
regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are
born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold,
inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, and must
constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters,
as for all oth