- Thus It Has
Happened, That Not The Arch Fiend Himself Has Been In My Way, But
These Toils Which Tradition Says Were Originally Spun To Obstruct
Him.
They are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man's
path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his
unswept and undusted garret.
I love man - kind, but I hate the
institutions of the dead un-kind. Men execute nothing so
faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and
letter. _They_ rule this world, and the living are but their
executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our
sermons, commonly. They are all _Dudleian;_ and piety derives
its origin still from that exploit of _pius Aeneas_, who bore his
father, Anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy. Or
rather, like some Indian tribes, we bear about with us the
mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders. If, for
instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the
merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him,
that he who is _living near_ him, sometimes even sustains him,
but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have
human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an
institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit
superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy;
that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called
wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior
and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else
may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes
by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not
prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.
"Now turn again, turn again, said the pinder,
For a wrong way you have gone,
For you have forsaken the king's highway,
And made a path over the corn."
Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is
not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition
of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate
portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could
wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in the grave
of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above
ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively
rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man's
life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be
the same channel, but a new water every instant.
"Virtues as rivers pass,
But still remains that virtuous man there was."
Most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but
marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead. We read that when
in the expedition of Alexander, Onesicritus was sent forward to
meet certain of the Indian sect of Gymnosophists, and he had told
them of those new philosophers of the West, Pythagoras, Socrates,
and Diogenes, and their doctrines, one of them named Dandamis
answered, that "They appeared to him to have been men of genius,
but to have lived with too passive a regard for the laws." The
philosophers of the West are liable to this rebuke still.
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