do now. The legitimate
inference the disciple would draw was: "We are to have _such_ a good
time as the sinners have now"; or, to push it to its extreme import:
"You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could;
not being successful, we expect our revenue to-morrow."

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from
the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes
the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. Few men are wiser than
they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without
afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in
silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to
an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to
make his own statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

POLARITY,[97] or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature;
in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the
undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at
the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels.