as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature.
Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change
places! Condition does less, but "Give me neither poverty nor riches"
was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason. If there is any
improvement in modern theology, it is in getting out of the region
of pure abstractions and taking these every-day working forces into
account. The great theological question now heaving and throbbing in the
minds of Christian men is this:--

No, I won't talk about these things now. My remarks might be repeated,
and it would give my friends pain to see with what personal incivilities
I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be
talking about such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To
be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his
alphabet out of a quarto "Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many
thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it
is not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
time to express an opinion on theological matters.

I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of thought.
Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two letters a week,
requesting him to ..... .. ..... .. .. ...,--on the strength of some
youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent
constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?

----Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to
make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the
sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very
well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an
ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter
and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of
sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.
I have often heard the Professor talk about hysterics as being Nature's
cleverest illustration of the reciprocal convertibility of the two
states of which these acts are the manifestations; but you may see it
every day in children; and if you want to choke with stifled tears at
sight of the transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see
Mr. Blake pl