4. Verse 5.--Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker.
(Mocketh,--by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than his misfortune,--England's favorite theory now-a-days.)
5. Verse 12.--Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly.
(Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the passengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools,"--on the ground that men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under, as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will please observe that the essential function of modern education is to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his forge and plow,--and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to London,--give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,--and it is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over London Bridge.)
6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of competitive examination:--
Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it?
(You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the "station in life,"--and the money!)
7. Lastly, Verse 7.--Wisdom is before him that hath understanding, but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.
"And in the beginnings of it"! Solomon would have written, had he lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present. No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil, and to end--in nothing.
And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives us,--founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'--the latest scientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spoken already about a medium pervading space"--this is the Scientific God, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the purest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--this spacious Deity--a _Medium_, pervading space--"the office of which" (italics all mine) "appears to be to _degrade_ and ultimately _extinguish_, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out by Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is a system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert mass, _and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, will have utterly gone away_."