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Glory is, again, a human passion: it is in man the desire of giving his fellow- creatures an high opinion of him; this, passion is laudable when it stimulates him to undertake great projects when it determines him to perform useful actions but it is very frequently a weakness attached to his nature; it is nothing more than a desire to be distinguished from those beings with whom he compares himself, without exciting him to one noble, one generous act.
"See here, suppose an unbeliever determines to get the better of his besettin' sin. He's man enough to strive well for a time. At last he begins to grow a little weary o' the battle it is so awful hard. Better almost to die an' be done with it, he sometimes thinks. Then comes a day when his temptation is ten times more than he is able to bear.
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than the charge and care of their religion.
I have heard this view defended in private by a bishop, who apparently never saw that in adopting it he had given up entirely the orthodox Protestant view that there is no chance for a man after death, and that the thing which determines our post-mortem destiny is not our conduct, but our belief.
Without these every street would be silent, every office deserted, every factory fallen into disrepair. And yet the farmer does not stand upon the same footing with the forester and the miner in the market of credit. He is the servant of the seasons. Nature determines how long he must wait for his crops, and will not be hurried in her processes.
Thus, though we all talk to each other as if about the same world, each of us is thinking of his own kind of world, the only one he sees. And that is why there can never be sympathy and understanding among the children of men until there is some approach to resemblance in their various lots; for the lot determines the man. The house was filled with women of her own kind.
De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the moment or of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and deliberately. He calculates with sangfroid the profit and the risk of every infamous action he proposes to commit, and determines accordingly.
"The great thinker, who never loses sight of the most distant goal, who weighs and considers again and again ere he determines upon the only right course in each instance the great general who understands how to make far-reaching plans for military campaigns as ably as to direct a cavalry attack the statesman whose penetration pierces deeper than the keen intelligence of his famous councillors the wise law-giver, the ruler with the iron strength of will and unfailing memory, is perhaps the soundest person mentally among all of us at court- nay, among the millions who obey him.
Unhappy will be the future of that man, however amiable, affectionate, and generous, who, whether from neglect in youth, like Byron, or from sheer wilfulness in manhood, determines to act as the mood takes him, because he has freedom of will, without regard to the social restraints imposed upon conscience by the unwritten law, which pursues him wherever he goes, even should he fly to the uttermost parts of the earth.
In Paris, when a woman determines to make a business, a trade, of her beauty, it does not follow that she will make a fortune. Lovely creatures may be found there, and full of wit, who are in wretched circumstances, ending in misery a life begun in pleasure. And this is why.
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