If we could look on
life, as our successors will two hundred years hence, we too might
complain of being "lone in the city of the blind;" unless large Hope
and Benevolence enabled us to live on the future. Thus we find
additional motive to desiring a united and absolute, rather than an
individual and relative progress, in the consideration that knowledge
most worthily so called--whoso increaseth greatly beyond the average
attainment, doth so to his own sorrow.
To complete the list of false estimates of good, refuted by one test,
we should allude to the frivolities of gentility and fashion-the
passion for wearing badges of distinction, however impotent or
unmeaning such may be. This is the very poorest form of finding
delight, in what from the nature of the case can be shared by few.
For its incommunicableness is its only recommendation. It is an icy
repellant, freezing up the kindly flow of sympathy with universal
humanity; and uncompensated loss of that best ingredient of earthly
felicity--the interchange of friendly feelings and offices; that store
of wealth, from which the more that take, and the fuller their share,
the more they leave to be taken by others.
The foregoing may be treated as a fine and just speculation, but as
what ever must remain a barren speculation; as if it were after the
example of all ages, that men should mistake the material of happiness
for happiness itself.
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