truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies in assuming its truth for purposes of action, and on no other terms can a creature with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

ADVANTAGES OF DISCUSSION.

MAN is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and arguments; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story without comments to bring out their meaning. The strength and value, then, of human judgment depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that has been said against him, to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon other occasions to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this, nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of collecting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those

of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers, knowing that he has sought for objection and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter, he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process. Mill.

WORK.

THERE is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.

The latest truth in this world is, know thy work and do it. "Know thyself; " long enough has that poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

It has been written, "an endless significance lies in work;" as man perfects himself by writing. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets

himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but as he bends himself with free valor against his task, all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of labor in him; is it not a purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and out of the sour smoke of which there is made bright blessed flame?

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an ever deepening river there, it runs and flows; draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass blade ; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor is life; from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial lifeessence, breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, "self-knowledge," and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge! the knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working; the rest is yet all an hypothesis of knowledge: a thing to be argued of in philosophy a thing floating in the clouds, till we try it and fix it. Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute Powers of fact, in ordering of thy fel

lows in such wrestle, there, and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually learn.

Yes, all manner of work, and pious response from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first "impossible." In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity, inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether, under the wide arch of Heaven, there be any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind localities and town and country parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature: work is of a brave nature; which it is the aim of all religion to be. "All work of man is as the swimmer's:" a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. "It is so," says Goethe, "with all things that man undertakes in this world." Carlyle.

EXCELLENCE ATTAINABLE BY LABOR ALONE. NATURAL historians assert, that whatever is formed for long duration, arrives slowly at maturity. Thus the firmest timber is of tardy growth. The same observation may be extended to the growth of offshoots of the mind. Hasty compositions, however they please at first by flowery luxuriance, and spread in the sunshine of temporary favor, can seldom endure the change of seasons, but perish at the first blast of criticism or frost of neglect. When Apelles was reproached with the paucity of his productions, and the incessant attention with which he retouched his pieces, he condescended to make no other answer, than that he painted for perpetuity.

No vanity can more justly incur contempt and indignation than that which boasts of negligence and hurry. For who can bear with patience the writer who claims such superiority to the rest of his species, as to imagine that mankind are at leisure for attention to his extemporary sallies, and that posterity will reposit his casual effusions among the treasures of ancient wisdom!

Men have sometimes appeared of such transcendant abilities, that their slightest and most cursory performances excel all that labor and study can enable meaner intellects to compose; as there are regions of which the spontaneous products cannot be equalled in other soils by care and culture. But it is no less dangerous for any man to place himself in this rank of understanding, and fancy that he is born to be illustrious without labor, than to omit the cares of husbandry, and expect from his ground the blossoms of Arabia.

Dr. Johnson.