WE look for some reward of our endeavours and are
disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even
peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do
well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren;
the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the
sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong;
and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth,
and find them change with every climate, and no country
where some action is not honoured for a virtue and none
where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules,
but at the best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if
we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much.
Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to
flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised,
and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher
strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing
gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than
the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions
of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and
fungus, more ancient still.

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