covert deed, may reach forth his hand and take a drink of brandy, which drink begets an additional inflammation: his virtue is a vanishing quantity straightway, and his persistence, amatory intensity, is an accreting force, and he goes to " the devil as straight as a string," totally without reference to free-will, moral law, heaven, hell, or Mrs. Grundy. Why? Because the coarser chemistry of the body has induced action in the finer chemistry of spirit, and these two win immediate victories over the soul — the fight being two against one.
Now, will the casuists please weigh me out the exact heft of that man's free-will and guilt? When you want to catch a woman, bait the hook with diamonds — large — and she is very apt to bite! And when you you want to catch a man, bait with a pretty woman, and you will go home with more game than hunter ever yet returned with. Good-morning, free-will!
Free-will is all a fleeting show
To amuse us in life's span.
Man wants but woman here below,
And woman wants but man.
"What'll you bet that isn't true?" said a gentlemen at my side, — a great poet, and a natural one, — as I penned the lines. I admitted its truth, and prosily asked, "Why?"
Said he, " You're a fool. God in matter and nature, as you know it, is but the spirit of life, growth, increase, increment; that and that only is his mode in this department of what is, and the most of what is lays beyond the reach of matter-environed intellect, and all it is good for is to grow. All matter is good, for it is to afford a theatre of forces, and all man has to do below is to increase in all directions, multiply all his powers and replenish the earth, not only with rightly begotten and born young ones, — a vast improvement on their parents, — but with all possible improving agencies."
God does not trouble himself about whether Molly's child was born before being commissioned properly by the Rev. Dr. Tenthly in a surplice, or after; but whether the child can eat his allowance and turn it into good quantity and quality of clear brain. He does not care whether John marries Sally, but that each shall marry some body and soul; for the earth, and air, and sunshine, and matter were all specially destined as nurseries of the incarnate God, by the
