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Part I
Part I
Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that on this subject Life
was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The
documents too from which the be doctrine is to drawn, charmed my fancy by
their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are
the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the
street, the farm and the dwelling-house; the greetings, the relations, the
debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature and endowment of all
men. It seemed to me also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the
present action of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition;
and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love,
conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be, because it
really is now. It appeared moreover that if this doctrine could be stated in
terms with any resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is
sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked
passages in our journey, that would not suffer us to lose our way.
I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary
manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not
executed in this world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are
miserable; and then urged from reason and from Scripture a compensation to be
made to both parties in the next life. No offence appeared to be taken by the
congregation at this doctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting
broke up they separated without remark on the sermon.
Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by
saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that houses and
lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men,
whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a compensation is to be made
to these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications another day, -
bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be the
compensation intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to
pray and praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they can 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 revenge tomorrow."
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, and
summoning the dead to its present tribunal.
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 theodogy 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. For 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, 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
systole and diastole 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. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects
nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it
whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; subjective, objective; in, out; upper,
under; motion, rest; yea, nay.
Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire
system of things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat that
resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and woman, in a
single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every
animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within these
small boundaries. For example, in the animal kingdom the physiologist has
observed that no creatures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances
every gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a
reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are
enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.
The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic or compensating errors
of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate and soil in
political history are another. The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil
does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions.
The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every excess
causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil
its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty
put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every
grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you
have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.
If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers
too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the
estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves
of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing than
the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always some
levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich,
the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too
strong and fierce for society and by temper and position a bad citizen, - a
morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him? - nature sends him a troop
of pretty sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame`s classes at
the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes the
boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps her balance true.
The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and
the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous
an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real
masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or do men desire the more
substantial and permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He
who by force of will or of thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the
responsibility of overlooking. With every influx of light comes new danger.
Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always outrun that
sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new
revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, wife and
child. Has he all that the world loves and admires and covets? - he must cast
behind him their admiration and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth and
become a byword and a hissing.
This Law writes the laws of the cities and nations. It will not be
baulked of its end in the smallest iota. It is in vain to build or plot or
combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male
administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and
will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor`s life is not safe. If
you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal
code sanguinary, juries will not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing
artificial can endure. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude
the utmost rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with
great indifferency under all varieties of circumstance. Under all governments
the influence of character remains the same, - in Turkey and New England about
alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that
man must have been as free as culture could make him.
These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in
every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of
nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one
type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish
as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new
form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all
the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system
of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human
life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end.
And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all his
destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the
animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell,
motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on
eternity, - all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our
life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears
with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe
contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the
evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within
us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspirations; out there
in history we can see its fatal strength. It is almighty. All nature feels its
grasp. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." It is eternal but
it enacts itself in time and space. Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity
adjusts its balance in all parts of life. Oi kuBol Dlos aei ev ninrouol. The
dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table,
or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take
what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to
you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded,
every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is
the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If
you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that
the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.
Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself, in a
twofold manner: first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in the
circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the
retribution. The casual retribution is in the thing and is seen by the soul.
The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is
inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time and so does
not become distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may follow
late after the offence, but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and
punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens
within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means
and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in
the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we seek
to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example, - to gratify the
senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character.
The ingenuity of man has been dedicated to the solution of one problem, - how
to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc.,
from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to
contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it
bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the
body would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one
soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over
all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to
its own ends.
The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would be
the only fact. All things shall be added unto it, - power, pleasure,
knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up for
himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in particulars, to ride
that he may ride ride; to dress that he may be dressed; to eat that he may
eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great; they would have
offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to get only
one side of nature, - the sweet, without the other side, - the bitter.
Steadily is this dividing and detaching counteracted. Up to this day it
must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted water
reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out
of profitable things, power out of strong things, the moment we seek to
separate them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual
good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a
light without a shadow. "Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running
back."
Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to
dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, brags that they do
not touch him; - but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul.
If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If
he has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has
resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death.
So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good
from the tax, that the experiment would not be tried, - since to try it is to
be mad, - but for the circumstance that when the disease began in the will, of
rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man
ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual
allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid`s
head but not the dragon`s tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he would
have from that which he would not have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in
the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an
unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires!"^1
[Footnote 1: St. Augustine, Confessions, B.I.]
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