Humor Divine 75 "The being who merely obeys the laws of nature is ipso facto a brute beast. The privilege of a man is to counteract (not break) one law of nature by another. In the exercise of that power stands all art, invention, polity, progress. "Now, what I complain of in political economy up to this time-what, indeed, earned for it Fourier's bitter epithet of the Science du néant.' . . . It says, There are laws of nature concerning economy, therefore you must leave them alone to do what they like with you and society! Just as if I were to say, You got the cholera by laws of nature, therefore you must submit to cholera ; you walk on the ground by laws of nature, therefore you must never go upstairs. Indeed, I am inclined to deny to political economy, as yet, the name of a science. It is as yet merely in its analytic stage; explaining the causes of phenomena which already exist. To be a true science, it must pass on into the synthetic stage, and learn how, by using the laws which it has discovered, and counteracting them by others when necessary, to produce new forms of society. As yet political economy has produced nothing. It has merely said 'Laissezfaire!' "Now, I am not complaining of it. I consider the analytic work of the political economists of the last hundred years as invaluable. It forms the subject-matter for all future social science, and he who is ignorant of it builds on air. I only complain of their saying, 'You must not attempt to counteract these laws. You must allow chance and selfishness to rule the fortunes of the human race.' And this they do say. But "Now, as for any schemes of Maurice's or mine it is a slight matter whether they have failed or not. this I say, because I believe that the failure of a hundred schemes would not alter my conviction, that they are attempts in the right direction; and I shall die in hope, not having received the promises, but beholding them afar off, and confessing myself a stranger and a pilgrim in a world of laissez-faire. For it is my belief that not self-interest, but self-sacrifice, is the only law upon which human society can be grounded with any hope of prosperity and permanence. That self-interest is a law of nature I know well. That it ought to be the root law of human society I deny, unless society is to sink down again into a Roman empire, and a cage of wild beasts. ... I shall resist it, as I do any other snare of the devil; for if I once believed it I must carry it out. I must give up all which I have learnt most precious concerning political freedom, all which keeps me content with the world, because I look forward to a nobler state of humanity; and I must become as thorough a despotist and imperialist as Strafford himself. . . . So I am content to have failed. I have learned in the experiment priceless truths concerning myself, my fellow-men, and the City of God, which is eternal in the heavens, for ever coming down among men, and actualizing itself more and more in every succeeding age. I see one work to be done ere I die, in which (men are beginning to discover) Nature must be counteracted, lest she prove a curse and a destroyer, not a blessing and a mother; and that is, Sanitary Reform. Politics and political economy may go their way for me. If I can help to save the lives of a few thousand working people and their children, I may earn the blessing of God." "Mind I am not dogmatizing," he says to the same friend. "I only know that I know nothing, but with a hope that Christ, who is the Son of Man, will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I am, and what man is." CHAPTER XVII 1858 AGED 39 EVERSLEY WORK-DIPHTHERIA — LECTURES AND SERMONS AT ALDERSHOT-BLESSING THE COLORs of the 22D REGIMENT- STAFF COLLEGE-ADVANCED THINKERS - LETTER FROM Colonel Strange - Esau anD JACOB - POEMS AND SANTA MAURA BIRTH OF HIS SON GRENVILLE SECOND VISIT TO YORKshire - CorRESPONDENCE WITH MR. HULLAH ON SONGS IN YORKSHIRE- - GROUNDS OF FAITH LETTERS ON MIRACLES TO SIR WILLIAM COPE "He was what he was, not by virtue of his office, but by virtue of what God had made him in himself. He was, we might almost say, a layman in the guise or disguise of a clergyman — fishing with the fishermen, hunting with the huntsmen, able to hold his own in tent and camp, with courtier or with soldier; an example that a genial companion may be a Christian gentleman - that a Christian clergyman need not be a member of a separate caste, and a stranger to the common interests of his countrymen. Yet, human genial layman as he was, he still was not the less-nay, he was ten times more-a pastor than he would have been had he shut himself out from the haunts and walks of men. He was sent by Providence, as it were, 'far off to the Gentiles'- far off, not to other lands or other races of mankind, but far off from the usual sphere of minister or priest, 'to fresh woods and pastures new,' to find fresh worlds of thoughts and wild tracts of character, in which he found a response to himself, because he gave a response to them." A. P. STANLEY TH (Funeral Sermon on Canon Kingsley). "Yet he was courteous still to every wight, SPENSER. HIS was a year of severe work and anxiety, for he could not afford a curate, and diphtheria, then a new disease in England, had ap peared and created a panic in the neighborhood. To him it was a new enemy to be hated, and fought against, as it was his wont to hate and fight against every form of disease, which arose, as he suspected this to do, from malaria, and other preventable causes. Its prevalence among children deeply affected and excited him, and he took counsel with medical men, as to how to meet it in its earliest symptoms. When it reached Eversley, some might have smiled at seeing him, going in and out of the cottages with great bottles of gargle under his arm, and teaching the people - men, women, and children to gargle their throats, as a preventive; but he did it in terrible grim earnest, acting as he did on Thomas Carlyle's principle, "Wheresoever thou findest disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him, make order of him." His work for the Hants and Wilts Education Society, to which he had bound himself to give so many lectures annually, in lieu of subscription, was heavy: he lectured on local Geology, on the Days of the Week, Eyes and No Eyes, on Jack of Newbury, and Flodden Field; in those days seldom repeating the same lecture. The position of Eversley with regard to Aldershot and Sandhurst, brought him more and more in contact with military men, and widened his sphere of influence. The society of soldiers as a class was congenial to him. "Next to my own farmers and laborers," he writes to a friend, "the officers of Aldershot and Sandhurst are the people for whom I feel and think and write." He inherited much of the soldier's spirit, as he inherited soldier blood; the few of his direct ancestors' Sermons at Aldershot 79 portraits that have survived the wreck of his family, are all men in uniform, including Colonel Kingsley, who was in the battle of Naseby, and General Kingsley, Governor of Fort William, colonel of the 20th Regiment, who fought at Minden. He had himself, at one time, thought of the army as a profession, and had spent much time as a boy in drawing plans of fortifications; and even after he took holy orders it was a constant occupation to him, in all his walks and rides, to be planning fortifications. There is scarcely a hill-side within twenty miles of Eversley, the strong and weak points of which in attack and defence during a possible invasion, he has not gone over with as great an intensity of thought and interest as if the enemy were really at hand; and no soldier could have read and re-read Hannibal's campaigns, Creasy's Sixteen Decisive Battles, the records of Sir Charles Napier's Indian warfare, or Sir William's magnificent history of the Peninsular War, with keener appreciation, his poet's imagination enabling him to fill up the picture and realize the scene, where his knowledge of mere military detail failed. Hence the honor he esteemed it to be invited to preach to the troops at Aldershot, and to lecture to military men there and at Woolwich. His eyes would kindle and fill with tears as he recalled the impression made on him on Whitsunday, 1858, by the sound heard for the first time, and never to be forgotten, of the clank of the officers' swords and spurs, and the regular tramp of the men as they marched into church, stirring him like the sound of a trumpet. He lectured this year, too, to the troops in camp on Cortez. He camped out one summer's night with the |