THE ARABULA.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAMENTATION.

Он, the heartless contradictions in human nature! Man, in his present state, is only a tamed savage. His best development of civilization rests upon a broad and ever-enlarging basis of brute instincts and savage attributes. All his monumental labors for the world's advancement are mixed with the unsubdued and undisguised propensities of selfishness. Civil society is but an entangling medley of antagonistic self-interests and immoral expedients.

Therefore no man is happy. Selfishness, the primal instinct, drives happiness out of the temple. The perplexities and contradictions of selfishness generate excessive laws in the tyrannical intellect. O, the deathless anguish of the wounds inflicted by man's struggling passion for wealth and power! His blunders and blindness are forgiven; but his lynx-eyed, self-justifying, willful intellect, which would crush millions to gain power and wealth, is anathematized and forever excluded from heaven.

And what is man's knowledge? Who believes that

it is wise? The millions walk in the false and hollow thoroughfares of ignorance and priest-supported superstitions. Mammon-serving myrmidons crowd upon the paths of selfish knowledge. Ignorance first builds lightexcluding palaces, and then dedicates them to the mysteries of an impracticable religion. And man, in the plenitude of his shameless inconsistencies, prides himself upon his devotion to mystery. With commanding dignity, he styles his religious mystery, "Knowledge of God's Will." Wherefore, in the boundlessness of his ignorance, he assumes the possession of rare intelligence. The slanting rays of science, a sun that has not yet risen, he applauds as the full blaze of absolute truth.

Moralists disappoint their intimate acquaintances. Their virtues are best seen in the shrouding profundities and hair-splitting distinctions they exhibit in the science of morals. They exhaust themselves in preaching and expounding the laws of virtue; they consign the duty of practicing morality to the uneducated multitude. The profoundest theorist in morals is impelled, by an ever-increasing tendency, to transgress, in daily dealings, his fundamental maxims of justice, truth, and virtue. The primal instinct of selfishness surmounts and crushes the holiest proclamations of eternal truth.

The contradictions of human nature cover the earth with a blighting, desolating darkness. A man who preaches the precepts of peace is not often a comfort to his family. His wife is a great skeptic in his theory. Her eye is upon the manifestations of the eloquent expounder's life. Peace-laden principles flow out from his word-skilled tongue, and the tender glances of pure ⚫ and undefiled religion fall from his heaven-lifted eyes;

yet his family, sailing in the weather-beaten bark of a selfish society, compounded of conflicting interests, longing for love to direct the helm, can remember the trials and wounds of fierce wars at the fireside.

If you want Justice, do you appeal to robed and ermined power in the State? If you seek Religion, do you adopt as final the magnificent mummeries and cabalistic ceremonies of the Established Church? If you seek consistency, do you take as its embodiment the man of civilization; only a tamed savage, with positive selfish instincts, and the profoundest intellectual disregard of others' rights and liberties?

Crucify the redeemers of the world; put them through nameless miseries; banish the reformers into interminable mountains of frost, desolation, and sorrow; kindle the fagots of wrath about the pioneers of infinite benefits; condemn to dungeons the brave heroes who have resisted the organized selfishness of powerful governments; starve the saviors of slaves, who have, during a sad lifetime, toiled without reward, under the blistering lash of crime-promoting task-masters; turn deafened ears to the sighs of fallen women, who have, under the magnetic touch and bewildering persuasions of hypocritical love, erred within the burning passion of some selfgratifying human savage; cover, with inextinguishable contumely and misrepresentations, the fearless teacher, who would overthrow the world's errors in religion, bring a rational conception of God, and initiate principles of higher degrees of existence. O, intelligent, selfish, tyrannical, savage, contradictory man! What shall increase your capacities for consistent, benevolent, magnanimous living?

Most vulnerable is he who makes boast of his high impregnability. No man is more cowardly than he who prides himself upon his valor. The immeasurable fool is self-sustained with the sweet consciousness of being the wisest man in town. The richest merchant in the city cannot afford the luxuries common in the household of his chief clerks. The inimitable comedian, whose simplest speech and gesture convulse with merriment an audience of two thousand intelligent people, is the epitome of independent and incurable melancholy. The infinitely happy lady, whose street habiliments and evening-party deportment are unapproachably perfect, carries a heart well-nigh bursting with wounds and disappointments. The honest citizen is unjustly living upon heavy profits filched from the daily toil of hopeless men and women. The virtuous trader gratifies his savage rapacity by overpassing the boundaries of justice in every bargain with less keen, but really honest men. The pious preacher, whose voice is for the extermination of sin and every other form of evil, is profane when anathematizing the enemies of his creed. The politician is the faithful servant of the State so long as the emoluments and accruing fame are commensurate with his magnanimous selfishness. The physician's interests are inseparably allied with the pecuniary health of his patients. The family of a professional philanthropist is most threatened with visitations of poverty and inhuman neglect. An eloquent champion of the equal selfownership and political rights of women, was a tyrant at home, trampling upon the personal liberties of his resistless wife, and giving his sons an education superior to his daughters.