painfully your place and occupation and associates and
modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is
a possible right for you that precludes the need of
balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality,
a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the
middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates
all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled
to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. Then you
put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world,
the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not
be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work,
the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would
go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from
the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the
bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the
rose and the air and the sun.

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech
by which I would distinguish what is commonly called
choice among men, and which is a partial act, the
choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites,
and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call
right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution;
and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after,
is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution;
and the action which I in all my years tend to do, is the
work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable to
reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession.
It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they
are the custom of his trade. What business has he with