gives to each, truly and at once, its place, its due power, its relations, and its present and future uses and ends. Such a man fancies that which is apparently large to be greater than it really is, and what is apparently small he lessens; and thus is disappointed where he trusted, and is overwhelmed by that which he had despised. Knowing nothing of the workings of first principles, he of course foresees not their sure though slow results; soon becomes perplexed and bustling, and the more bustling for being perplexed; and having no single and generally operative truth to look to, runs into expedients, and is borne along in the series of evershifting events. In the rush of present things, stability of character is swept away, and the man gets overheated by the friction of close, grinding circumstances, and giddy in their whirl. Shut out from the calm past by the thronging of the exciting and urgent present, and standing too near to objects to take in their outline, they grow gigantic to him; then the spirit of exaggeration possesses him, disproportion follows, and the end is monstrous deformity. And this is the natural, nay, necessary termination; for, as old Bates well remarks, "To proportion, excesses as well as defects are opposite." And hence it is that we are all of us so besotted with the spirit of the age; and that men and women are perpetually set astare with some nine days' wonder. It all comes of the short-sighted, unstable, exaggerating present.

Are there not moral evils involved in these influences? Is not he who sees truth partially and limitedly less likely to reverence it singly, than if he knew something of its silent, but deep and wide-working power? Will he not be more likely to resort to contrivance to gain an immediate end, than to wait quietly upon some

great principle, of which he can but poorly discern the tendency, the certainty, and the strength?

Besides, there is a certain impatience attendant upon the present; and as errour is rapid, and truth slow, and nature, though working wider than art, moving so evenly and all together as apparently to move scarcely at all, the creature of the mere present will consort with his like, and be in sympathy with errour and art, rather than with nature and truth.

Association with the present, making it difficult for the mind to extricate itself from the near and the visible, and withdraw apart for meditation and abstraction, the consequence is, a want of true self-acquaintance, and from this, again, an over-estimate of the good in us, and an under-estimate of the ill. More familiar with the outward world than with that more important world within, our rule of judging is not a simple, permanent principle of perfectness and truth, which is not hard of apprehension to the inward-turned mind, — but it is the outward, the changeable, the mixed,—that which chances to go current for the time, under the blessedly vague and comprehensive appellative, the respectable. The way being thus made easy, each man comes to judge himself, with the subtle purpose of justifying himself; and to this end will, when hard pressed, even turn to justifying his neighbour, and so shelter himself under his charity for another. With finite to regulate the finite, with fallible the fallible, he soon becomes content with the secondary, seizes upon some convenient particular, and losing the apprehension of the one great motive power to all good, fails of that fulness of moral tone, that nobleness of inward impulse, which are his who sees truth in its vastness, and feels it in its steady, and harmonious, and eternal goings-on.

Meditative abstraction is not only necessary to a right self-judging, but to that well-disciplined composure which shall preserve self-thoughtfulness amidst the changing activities and exciting influences which every man must go out to meet, when he goes into the world. It is true, that it will not always help him to meet foreseen particulars; but what is better, it will help him to go with a prepared spirit to bear them. But what preparation has he to whom abstraction is pain, and not a delight, because not habitual? And how predisposed does he go to take the shape and hue of the surrounding present, who thinks too little of the past to draw from it experience, and whose extravagant notions of the present impart new power, to react upon himself, to that which has already too much, from being visible and near?

A particular bent of mind not only strengthens, upon the principle that inward power increases with action, and also from a sympathetic association with that of the outward, which resembles it in tendency and kind, but as it strengthens, so grows its distaste to that which is the contrary of itself. And the man in whom the present once becomes predominant retires more and more reluctantly and infrequently into the past and the reflective, into the unseen but conscious state of being within. Principles lose possession of his mind, and things take their places; and not seeing far or justly, he would rather see much and many than think much and deeply. The action of his mind is outward, outward; and observation justles aside reflection. He may attain to a certain sagacity which will give him a ready mastery over present things, as to present uses; but he will not be aware the while, that there is a secretly pervading power in what he is managing, which is

making him servant to that over which he thinks he holds rule.

Knowledge, or the immediate and obvious uses of knowledge, rather than its final purposes, being his aim, acquiring takes the character of an indiscriminating passion, or, more properly, appetite; and so the mind be well filled, he thinks not to ask himself, Why all this jumble of things here? The near or remote, the like or the unlike, is all the same to him; and if not adapted to his nature, he has only to adapt his nature to them. And this his process of working does for him speedily. For the objects of his mind lying in accidental juxtaposition, and not being united by any permanent relationship in the nature of things, the weak principle of unity within is soon broken up, and he sees only parts, and thinks only of parts. There is truth, in more senses than one, in the term applied to a clever man, a man of parts; for we scarcely think of

him as an individual whole, a unit. Indeed, the term, a man of knowledge, does not describe him; for the singular, knowledge, gives the impression of oneness. So, seeing that we now have the plural, literatures, why not have another plural, and call him a man of knowledges?

This certainly is the tendency of the present upon the character, so that he who lives mainly in it has but little acquaintance with the intuitive, the principle of spiritual life not having been awakened in him. In that life are included inward growth and action; but his action is outward, and his increase not that of a single internal expansive principle, growth, but that of accretion; and he is little better than an aggregation of unchanged, foreign bodies, adhering to him and to one another, not so much by any elective affinities as by some external propulsion.

I know not how better to illustrate the two orders of minds, than by a piece of variegated marble, in which the delicately tinted branchings seem but the veins and arteries of one original body, the issues of its own life; and next, by an uncouth, dead mass of pudding-stone. Here it is! bulky enough, to be sure. But where its unity? A mere heap of stones, tumbled together by some rolling flood of fire or water, and left to cool down, or thicken, into this shapeless, loose mass, from which one may take out piece after piece, without marring their beds. But can you unvein the marble?

The present, by diminishing the inward life and action, and, of course, the sources of individual internal enjoyment, soon makes seclusion inert and wearisome, and drives men out to congregate for the sake of sensation and action. This brings about, not a social, but a gregarious state. For the life of the social principle springs not from inward vacuity, but from inward love, -a living and a life-imparting quality of the soul. So that the more gregarious a man becomes, the less a social creature is he. He mixes not with men to make friendly interchange of rich things, or to bestow of the affluence of his own soul, but because of the poverty at home. He leaves his door a beggar of his daily bread, and hears said unto him, "Be ye warmed, and be ye clothed," and returns colder, emptier, and nakeder, than he went: He goes, not to give, but to get; and the root and the offspring of this is selfishness.

Going forth without a strong individuality of character, the growth of retired meditation and few and close attachments and habits that have worked into the constitution of the mind, men assimilate carelessly and unconsciously with the circumstances, views, and notions