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Show SENTIMENT AND SENSE. We are led on, like the little children, by a way that we know not. One must learn to deal with odd and even in life as well as in figures. We can hardly learn humility and tenderness enough except by suffering. When what is good comes of age and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing. It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the thresholds of their own homes. There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. The strongest heart will faint sometimes under the feeling that enemies are bitter and that friends only know half the sorrow. In the conflict between vice and virtue in the heart of man, one side or the other must triumph; it is impossible for the result to be a drawn battle. If we are ever caught in a shower of prosperity remember we can find shelter with some poor neighbor, on whose threshold we might allow some of the superfluous drops to fall. As waste and worthless lands can be made to yield abundantly by proper care and cultivation, so can arid and barren hearts be reclaimed by kind and sympathetic endeavors. No man can be thoroughly manly, nor carry the blossom, bloom and fruit, unless he has in a large measure what belongs to a good and a well regulated mind. Asceticism never made a good man. We have never seen a man bewailing his ill-fortune without something of contempt for his weakness. No individual or nation ever rose to eminence in any department which gave itself up to childish complaints. When our indignation is borne in submissive silence, we are apt to feel twinges of doubt afterwards as to our own generosity, if not justice; how much more when the object of our anger has gone into everlasting silence, and we have seen his face for the last time in the meekness of death. |