Human life is an endless exhibition of this law of balance or compensation. All things are double, one against another. “Harm watch, harm catch”; says the proverb. And again, “for every grain of wit that a man hath, is there a grain of folly”; No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him and no man had ever a defect that was not somehow made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and, afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until first he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same.

The world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind, and that one mind is everywhere, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool, active, and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere baulked and baffled, because things are so made and not otherwise. This doctrine in numberless ways the ancients expressed. This is their doctrine of Nemesis who keeps watch in the universe. And lets no offence go unchastised. “The Furies,” they said, “are attendants on Justice and if the Sun in Heaven should transgress his path would punish him.” The poets related that brute walls and iron swords and leather thongs forgot not the wrongs of their owners, that the belt which Ajax gave Hector, dragged the Trojan over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles; and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded, that, when the Thesians erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it every night, and endeavored to throw it down by repeated blows, till, at last, he moved it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath its fall.

Authentic history and biography, and the walls of every house testify the same thing. The modern historian has remarked that the Emperor Charles V always dissembled and never was believed. They have remarked that “the pretensions to miraculous power lent the Catholic clergy extensive aid for which they were one day to pay a high price in the general unbelief to which these pretensions gave rise.” They have testified that that came to pass in our times which was anciently spoken, that when you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

What can be more sublime than this doctrine that the soul of the world does impregnate every atom and every spirit with its omnipotent virtue, so that all things are tuned and set to good. Evil is merely privative not absolute. It is like cold which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much nonentity, so much death. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit which is differently named love, justice, temperance in its different applications just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks these ends he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries, his being shrinks out of all remote channels and he disuniversalizes and he individualizes himself—and becomes all the time less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute privation. Pure badness therefore could not subsist. It is annihilation.