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So with the resolute undertaking of Argantes, in Tasso, to slay Tancred, the slayer of his betrothed; all the people applauding his resolve, and rejoicing in the assurance that this

. . . boaster stout

Would kill the prince who late had slain his love.

O promise vain! it otherwise fell out.

Men purpose, but high gods dispose above;

For underneath his sword this boaster died,

Whom there he scorned and threatened in his pride."

In Homer, again, how grieves Achilles, and, impetuous, vents to all his myrmidons his loud laments?

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'By what vain promise, gods! did I engage,
When, to console Menætius' feeble age,

I vowed his much-loved offspring to restore;
Charged with rich spoils to fair Opuntia's shore.
But mighty Jove cuts short, with just disdain,
The long, long views of poor designing man!"

IT

A PURSEBEARER'S PROTEST AGAINST
PURPOSELESS WASTE.

ST. JOHN xii. 5.

T was very costly ointment of spikenard that Mary took. and anointed therewith the feet of Jesus, so that the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. So costly, that it set one of His apostles to work, counting the cost. Judas Iscariot was this ready reckoner. He was conversant with figures. He was the pursebearer of the apostolic circle, and knew, it seems, how and when and why to keep a tight finger on the purse-strings. The wasted contents-waste he accounted it-of that alabaster box might have been sold for three hundred denarii, and the proceeds given to the poor. As pursebearer he protested. And nominally his protest was in behalf of the poor.

Referring to that text in Exodus which tells how the people brought much more than enough for the service of the work which the Lord commanded to make, the question was put by

a divine who, being dead, yet speaketh: When will the earth again hear that glad announcement? Yet, until we bring more than enough, he said, at least until there is kindled in us a spirit which will make us desire to do so, we shall never bring enough. "And ought we not? Your economists will say No. They who would think the sun a useful creature, if he would come down from the sky and light their fires, will gravely reprehend such wasteful extravagance." This last figure of speech has its parallel in Mr. Carlyle's estimate of "the uses of this Dante:" he declines to say much about his "uses;" he holds that an influence working, like Dante's, into the depths of our existence, and feeding through long times the life-roots of all excellent things whatsoever, is not to be very satisfactorily computed by "utilities." Dante shall therefore be invaluable, or of no value: "We will not estimate the sun by the quantity of gas-light it saves us."

Judas the pursebearer was, as a French divine characterizes. him, exact, positif, calculateur; one who habituated himself to compute everything by a ready-money standard, and to appraise every action by the rule of immediate utility. He might be accurate to a fraction in his reckoning of what that "wasted" ointment would have fetched in the market; but, had not his heart been already in some sort ossified, he would have comprehended that "au dessus de l'utile il y a le beau, et au dessus du calcul le dévouement, et qu'à une âme qui déborde d'une joie extraordinaire il faut des moyens extraordinaires aussi pour exprimer ce qu'elle éprouve. Judas a perdu le sens des réalités purement spirituelles, qui lui paraissent vagues, parce que, comme l'infini, elles résistent aux chiffres."

When Dr. Justus Jonas told Dr. Martin Luther of a certain potent landholder, who said to Duke John Frederic, when commending to him the gospel of Christ, "Sir, the gospel pays no interest,"-"Have you no grains ?" was Luther's interrogative comment,-citing the words of the swine at the lion's feast, when invited to feast on recondite dainties. Even so, said Dr. Martin, there are inveterate worldlings who, when

invited to the spiritual feast of fat things well refined, "turn up their snouts, and ask for guilders. Offer a cow nutmeg, and she will reject it for old hay."

It is a too true bill of indictment against the mass of men, that, knowing that two and two make four, and that four is of a higher value than three, they practically conclude, carrying out into practice the conclusion, that to amass is to become wealthy, and that to bestow is to become the poorer. With this arithmetic the children of this world are wise in their generation, and add field to field, house to house, to some purpose. But by what right, asks a voice from the sanctuary, do they take upon themselves to pronounce on such qualities and realities as devotion and charity, as detachment from the "good things of this life" and renunciation of indulgence to the senses? If they witness a deed of noble self-sacrifice, they can but wag their heads, in shocked surprise and bewilderment at such a blunder in arithmetic, une telle faute de calcul. "Ils ne comprennent pas qu'on puisse soupirer après d'autres biens que ceux de la matière, après d'autres vérités que celles de l'arithmétique." There are many, very many more things than are dreamt of in their philosophy; dreaming, indeed, is rather out of their way; and perhaps philosophy too, for the matter of that.

Coleridge, denouncing the "moral" consequences of Napoleon's tyranny, as far more to be dreaded than the worst of those outward and calculable evils, which chiefly shock the imaginations of men, is out of all patience with such objections as, "What good will the Tyrolese do themselves by their heroic resistance ?" "What are the Spaniards fighting for?" etc.,—as if man were made only to eat above ground, and be eaten; as if we had no dignity to preserve, no conscience to obey, no immortality to expect.

What good can it do him? demands the vulgar fine lady in "Cecil," who hears that a certain well-to-do man of genius has written a book. A man, she argues, writes for money or distinction: what can be this man's object? he don't want to be made a baronet, nor does he want to increase his income. Where can be the use of writing? And where, she is (by cross

questioning) answered, can be the use to the aloe of its flower, to the mine of its gold? Oldbuck of Monkbarns might have done worse than parody, as he did, the "brutal ignorance" of your cui bono querists of the baser sort, in the strain of Gray's Bard,

"Weave the warp and weave the woof,

The winding-sheet of wit and sense;
Dull garment of defensive proof

'Gainst all that does not gather pence."

That a new machine, a new experiment, the discovery of a salt, or of a bone, should, in England, receive a wider homage, than the most profound speculation from which no obvious results are apprehended, this way of contemplating affairs Mr. Buckle was prompt to own as certainly productive of great good. But he also took care to declare it to be, with equal certainty, a one-sided way, satisfying a part only of the human mind-many of the noblest intellects craving for something which it cannot supply. There are mortals who, as a clerical essayist has said, cannot understand or sympathise with the gratification arising from a study of graceful and beautiful objects; who think that the supply of animal necessities is all that any man (but themselves, perhaps) can need. What more can he want? they exclaim, if the man be well-fed, and welldressed, and well-lodged. Why, if he had been a horse or a pig, is the answer, he would have wanted nothing more; but the possession of a rational soul brings with it pressing wants which are not of a material nature, not to be supplied by material things, and not felt by pigs and horses. And the craving for surrounding objects of grace and beauty is held to be one of these. Mr. Emerson, in his far-going way, goes so far as to say, as regards the "base rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts are held" in his country,—that let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, "and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best

use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him to save his board." M. de Tocqueville somewhere observes, that to cross almost impenetrable forests, to swim deep rivers, to encounter pestilential marshes, to sleep exposed to the damp air of the woods, these are efforts which an American easily conceives, if a dollar is to be gained by them—that is the point; but that a man should take such journeys from curiosity, he cannot understand. The German poet is often cited for his remark, that the Cow of Isis is to some the divine symbol of knowledge, to others but the milch cow, only regarded for the pounds of butter she will yield. An English sympathiser exclaims, "O tendency of our age, to look on Isis as the milch cow! Gaze on the goddess," he bids a sordid aspirant, "and get ready the churn and thy scales, and let us see what butter will fetch in the market." When Judge Haliburton's typical Yankee is asked by the old minister what he thinks of Niagara, and forthwith expatiates on the "grand spec" it offers for factory purposes for carding mills, fulling mills, cotton mills, grain mills, saw mills, plaster mills, and never a want of water for any or all of them, his pastor upbraids him with almost sacrilege in that style of talk; exclaiming, "How that dreadful thirst of gain has absorbed all other feelings in our people, when such an idea could be entertained for a moment! It [Niagara] is a grand spectacle, it is the voice of nature in the wilderness, proclaiming to the untutored tribes there of the power and majesty and glory of God. Talk not to me of

mills, factories, and machinery, sir, nor of introducing the money-changers into the temple of the Lord."

THE

LIGHT AT EVENING-TIME.

ZECHARIAH xiv. 7.

HE promise, or prediction, to be found in the words of the son of Berechiah, that "at evening-time it shall be light," is gratefully accepted by devout souls in perhaps a strained and wrested sense; but a sense so comforting, so full

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