als as these last,
(unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence,) many
things become clear to us, which before were hard
sayings; propositions become alive which, usually, are
but dry words. Our hearts seem purer, our motives
loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge
to ourselves. And, as man is unequal to himself, so
is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The
entire method of action, the theories of human life which
in one area prevail universally, to the next are
unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed
mere baseness to the first, if the first could have
anticipated them. One, we may suppose, holds some "greatest
nobleness principle," the other some "greatest happiness
principle;" and then their very systems of axioms
will contradict one another; their general conceptions
and their detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments,
opinions, practices, will be in perpetual and endless
contradiction. Our minds take shape from our hearts,
and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own
meaning, but submit to many readings, according to the
power of eye which we bring with us.

The want of a clear perception of so important a
feature about us, leads to many singular contradictions.
A believer in popular Protestantism, who is also a
believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
regard mankind as growing every day in a more
and more advantageous position with respect to the
trials of life; and yet if he were asked whether it is
easier for him to "save his soul" in the nineteenth
century than it would have been in the first or second,
or whether the said soul is necessarily better worth
saving, he would be perplexed for an answer. There
is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like
the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had "lived
in the days of the fathers," if he had had their
advantages, he would have found duty a much easier matter;
and some of us in mature life have felt that, in old
Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of
Christianity, in the Crusades or at the Reformation,
there was a contagious atmosphere of general nobleness,
in which we should have been less troubled with the
little feelings which cling about us now. At any rate,
it is at these rare epochs only that real additions are
made to our moral knowledge. At such times, new
truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
longer or shorter, may