in the world of heart, superior to himself. A true and pure character, feeling its inferiority, and anxious to advance, cannot long remain in the background; it has sufficient power to attain the height of self-abnegating greatness. God sometimes deprives men of the strength necessary for action, but He never robs them of the faculty of progress, of spiritual elevation. Meanness and groveling are always voluntary, and their essence is to resist superiority, to struggle against it: thus all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes really needed for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval root of baseness.
An admirable picture of an exhausted and dying society is given us in the person of the precocious, but decrepit child; the sole fruit of this sad marriage. Destined from its birth to an early grave, its excitable imagination soon consumes its frail body. Nothing could be more exquisitely tender, more true to nature, than the portraiture of this unfortunate but lovely boy.
After the betrayal of our hero by his Ideal, the Guardian Angel again appears to him to give him simple but sage counsel:
"Return to thy house, and sin no more!
Return to thy house, and love thy child!"
But vain this wise advice! As if driven to the desert to be tempted, we again meet our hero in the midst of storm and tempest, wildly communing with Nature, trying to read in her changeful phenomena lessons he should have sought in the depths of his own soul; seeking from her dumb lips oracles to be found only in the fulfillment of sacred duties; for thus alone is to be solved the perplexing riddle of human destiny,—"Peace to men of good will." Roaming through the wilderness, sad and hopeless, and in his despair about to fall into the gloomy and blighting sin of caring for no one but himself, he hears the angel, who once more chants to him the divine lesson that only in self-sacrificing love and lowly duties can the true path to the Future be found:
"Love the sick, the hungry, the despairing!
Love thy neighbor, thy poor neighbor, as thyself, and thou wilt be
redeemed!"
5
