My Life as an Author

uman life to which I may briefly advert, as

lise his money and keep the house solvent for yet a year or two, utterly unheeding that ere long the grateful beneficiaire must be dragged down with his chief to poverty? Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will, stealing our rights by evil influence? Or of the seemingly luckless accident killing off our intending b

and under many circumstantial difficulties, preserving still through them all the innocent purity of childhood. True, the crown of greater knowledge is added to the Man; but although it be a knowledge both of evil and of good, theoretically,-it need not practically be a guilty knowledge. If one of any age, from the youngest to the oldest, has not the power of self-control perpetually in exercise, and

gher and deeper influences of personal religion, earnest prayer, honest watchfulness, and sincere-though it be but incipient-love of God and desire to imitate Christ, are not chief motives towards the purification of human passion, this brotherhood of a guild may tend to little except self-righteousness, and it will be well if hypocrisy and secret sin does not accompany that open boastfulness of a White Cross Order. After all said and done, a man-or woman-or precocious child-must simply take the rules of Christ and Paul, and Solomon, as his guide and guard, by "Resisting," "Fleeing," "Cutting off-metaphorically-the right hand, and putting out the right eye;" so letting "discretion preserve him and understanding keep him;" but there is nothing like flight; it is easy and speedy, and more a courage than a cowardice. Take a simple instance. Some forty years ago

nd? I have had many of these attacking me by word or letter on the excuse of my books. Who, if he once weakly gives way to their urgent advice to "search and see for himself," will not soon be addled and muddled by all sorts of sophistical and controversial botherations, if even he is not tempted to accept-for lucre if not godliness-the office of bishop, or apostle, or prophet, or anything else too freely offered by zealots to new converts, if of notoriety enough to exalt or enrich a sect; such sect in every case proclaiming itself the one only true Church, all other sects being nothing but impostors? We have all encountered such spiritual perils,-and happy may we feel that with whatever faults and failings, there is an orthod

and the contrivances of Wisdom but by the infused permission of some physical and moral evils; mercy, benevolence, design would in a universe of Best have nothing to do; that universe itself would grow stagnant, as incapable of