till it is shattered by its own monotony of senseless motion generating fervent heat, when it might be making bread of life for hungry souls! There are men and women who, when their cherished plans have failed, permit the energy of their disappointment and foreboding to wreak itself upon themselves in silence and apart, and the enormous strength and vitality of the human intellect are in no way more pathetically attested than by its ability to keep itself alive and regnant in the midst of such stupendous raids upon its life. But there are others who are like Antæus in the old mythology, of whom it is related that from every fall to earth he gathered strength for the encounter. Not until the battle seems to go against them do they "put on terror and victory like a robe," converting the energy of their disappointment and humiliation into an energy of patience and resource that makes the miserable defeat a prelude to success more fair and glorious than was at first within the scope of their desire. "Honor to those who have failed!" our burly Whitman cries. Yes, if for no other reason than because those who have failed, but have refused to stay failed, are those who have succeeded best of all. Only the brave deserve the fair. Success, the glorious maid, cannot be wooed and won in any temper less resolved than that of Browning's lover when he sings:

"Escape me, never, beloved!

So long as the world contains us both,

While I am I, and you are you,

I the loving and you the loth,

While the one eludes, must the other pursue.

"It is but to keep the nerves at strain,

To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,

And baffled get up to begin again.

So the chase takes up one's life, that's all;
While, look but once from your furthest bound,
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope drops to the ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me-ever removed."

This lover's temper does not always bring about success in love, as this world reckons. As little does it always bring about success when it is shown upon the field of practical affairs. But this at least is sure: in either case, the man is a success. He may not win the special object of his heart's desire. He does a better thing than that. He wins the grace of character, the amplitude of life, which makes of him a man indeed. The strength of obstacles which he has not overcome, but which he has resisted manfully, has passed into his heart. The man is a success. And better this result, a hundred times over, than that, while winning every outward victory, the man should be a failure in himself,—a conjunction which is not infrequent in the annals of the past, nor in the experience of the latest time.

There is another aspect of this matter, another illustration of this law of transmutation, the most serious of all, the most important: the energy of evil-doing can be converted into the energy of righteousness. That was not such an absurdity as it was perhaps considered at the time,— the remark, "If our friend [a man remarkable for moral excellence] were not such a good man, what a bad man he would be!" Conversely, it might almost be said of many who are not remarkable for moral excellence, "If they were not such bad men, what good men they would be!" They cannot do anything by halves. There is in them a fund of energy which must express itself,—if not in bad actions, then in good. To desist from evil-doing and so reach the zero-point of virtue is not sufficient for these spirits who are so strong and masterful. They are so constituted that they would rather "sin, and sin valiantly," as Luther said, than be like those whom Dante saw, whirling about the outer rim of hell, "neither for God nor for his enemies." Positive evil cannot be expelled from human natures by anything less forcible than positive good. When Buddha said, “Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time, hatred ceases by love," doubtless he had in mind men's mutual relations; but it is just as true of the relations of the inner life. Not by hating less and less

down to the zero-point does hatred cease in human hearts, but through some counter-passion of exalted love. The vices of the centuries, for the most part, are a testimony to the feebleness of "those lesser crimes, half converts to the right," the virtues of conventional religion. If those hardy sinners could have had presented to them the ideal of something better than a cloistered virtue,-"immortal garlands not to be run for without dust and heat," - they might have been as distinguished for their good as for their evil deeds. The proverbial expression, "The worse the sinner, the better the saint," has more of truth in it than it intends. For it intends only that the greater the sin repented of, the more abject will be the humiliation; and abject humiliation was for many centuries the essential quality of saintliness, and is so regarded still by many. The truth in it is that a negative and self-satisfied morality is something from which the individual and the community have more to fear than from certain outbursts of impassioned wickedness. This was the thought of Jesus when he told the Pharisees, the models of negative virtue in his time, "The publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you"; and when he conceived the parable of the Prodigal Son, as if the energy of the prodigal's reaction from his evil ways was a diviner possibility than the deadlevel moralism of his elder brother. Elsewhere in the Bible we read a different lesson: "He that has offended in the least has offended in all." But this is the miserable legality against which Jesus threw himself with all the energy of his sublime contempt. The fault of the adulterous woman was less heinous in his eyes than her accusers' zeal of accusation, or than the bloodless virtues of which they were so proud. For the good that was in her evil he forgave her, saying, "Go, and sin no more!" But the principle, “He that has offended in the least has offended in all," is the principle which, embodied in society, has said to almost every woman since the time of Jesus, “Go and sin still more: go and sin hell-deep." It is a principle which has been re

sinful

buked and shamed a million times unconsciously by men and women, the aggregate of whose virtue-spite of some great offence, it may be more than one is infinitely greater than that of others who have never done anything wrong; no, nor for that matter, anything right,- anything not merely negative.

The energy of evil-doing can be converted into the energy of righteousness. Yes, but not without the intervention of a middle term, not self-contempt, which poisons good desire, but noble shame, which makes it pure and strong. We may not continue in sin, that grace of character may abound.

"Saint Augustine, well hast thou said

That of our vices we can frame

A ladder, if we will but tread

Beneath our feet each deed of shame."

There are those who have endeavored to keep up the show of hell by the suggestion that human nature is “wax to receive and marble to retain" the impression of its own evil deeds. And, where there is the consciousness of this impression, there must be spiritual torment. And there are those who have opposed to the idea of divine forgiveness the idea. of cause and effect. Because every effect must have its cause, every fault must have its retribution. "What's writ is writ, would it were worthier"; but there it is forever. Something of truth there is, no doubt, in these expressions. But there is other truth which is every whit as true, and is, moreover, full of encouragement and inspiration. What's writ is writ; but something further can be written,— yes, and it can be written over that which is the record of our fault, as in the palimpsests of former times men wrote one thing above another, the page first cleansed with purifying tears. Men who have erred can so convert the energy of their consciousness of error and their noble shame into the energy of use and good that none whose good opinion is worth having will think of them less kindly or with less of admiration for the wrong that they have put away; and,

better still, they shall be able to forgive themselves as freely as they would another for faults repented of and cancelled by enduring righteousness.

"Oh, not the nectarous poppy lovers use,

Nor daily labor's dull Lethean spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse

To the soiled glory and the trailing wing."

Even so the poet comes to the assistance of the dogmatist in his endeavor to make out that every fault in us is forever a deduction from the sum of character and the sum of happiness within our reach. If man were a dead mechanism, it might be so; but he is a living organism, and it is not so. Thank Heaven, there are poets who have sung a more inspiriting and gladdening song! "They say best men are moulded out of faults," is Shakspere's golden phrase. And it is certain not only that there are and have been better men with faults repented of, and unrepented of, than others without fleck, but also that there are and have been men much better with some very serious faults, which they must painfully remember that they would or could have been without such faults. For these have broken up the dull stagnation of their lives. They have wrought in them a noble shame whose energy they have converted into an energy of high behavior and beneficent activity.

"No good is ever lost we once have seen:

We always may be what we might have been."

No, not exactly that, but something just as good, though different; and something better oftentimes than if we had not gone astray; and, if something better, then something happier.

But must not the evil deed be always an accusing memory? Yes, but I can conceive that men should sometimes bless the fault by whose reactionary force they have been driven in upon their citadel of high resolve. So fight I not as one that beateth the air. If there is nothing in the range of your