I, too, perplex’d with strife of good and ill, Long to be safe and still; Evil is present with me while I pray That good may win the day; Great Giver, grant me thy last gift and best, The gift of rest!
BUSINESS requires earnestness and strength of character, life must be allowed more freedom; business calls for the strictest sequence, whereas in the conduct of life inconsecutiveness is often necessary—nay, is charming and graceful. If thou art strict in the first, thou mayest allow thyself more freedom in the second; while if thou mix them up, thou wilt find the free interfering and breaking in upon the fixed.—_Goethe._
I.—THE SAILOR, PEDDLER, FARMER, PREACHER.
In mechanics, an eccentric is a wheel that can start all the rest of the machinery with a jerk and a kick, and keep it going. It was the little eccentrics that enabled ten thousand Chautauquans to scatter to every part of the land in a few hours. The cam-motion in human nature starts its machinery and scatters its thought. We ought to thank God for the minds that wabble. Every originator has been counted eccentric—many of them have been pronounced insane. The little Festuses sitting in judgment are always crying to the inspired apostles of truth, “Thou art beside thyself.”
It is finite mechanism and finite thought that invent geometry and theology. Men hang, cunningly and truly, their long counter-shafts of creed, of behavior, of thought, of dress, of consistency, of loyalty; they bolt and key thereto immovably all human characters which are round, “line them up” all true and uniform, lubricate with lucre, put on the steam and away they all go beautifully and all alike. Woe be to one who wabbles in this machine-shop of society! But God uses no plumb-lines, right-angles, levels or true circles. “Nature’s geometrician,” the bee, never made a true hexagon. The old planets go “spinning through the grooves of change” in eccentrics, and never collide. Erratic comets dash through and among them, and never crash. I suppose the most eccentric character that ever walked this earth was that strange boy from Nazareth who confounded the doctors with his unprecedented outgivings. His teachings were indeed so strange that after the world has been for one thousand nine hundred years trying to work its standard up to them, a perfect Christian would to-day be accounted _non compos mentis_ by the rest of Christendom.