“Ah! my poor friend,” replied Clement, “would you have me weep, then? Your men are such droll creatures! When one studies them deeply, he is obliged to ridicule them; otherwise we should die with weeping.” “He is right,” said John Story. “We see how they dispute and flay each other daily for a piece of meadow, a rut in the road which I could hold in the hollow of my hand. They write volumes on the subject; they sweat blood and water; they compel five hundred arrests; then afterwards they are astonished to find they have spent four times as much money as the thing they might have gained was worth. Why cannot men live at peace? If you put them off without wishing to press the suit, they become furious; and yet they always begin by representing their affairs to you in so equitable a light that the devil himself would be deceived. There is one thing I have observed, and that is, there is nothing which has the appearance of being in such good faith as a litigant whose case is bad, and who knows his cause to be unjust.” “Come, my friends,” cried Clement, “you speak well; all that excites compassion. You often ridicule me and what you please to call my simplicity, and yet I see everything just as clearly as anybody else; but I have a plain way of dealing, and I do not seek so much cunning. If God calls me, I answer at once: Lord, here I am! I have spent the nights of my youth in studying, in learning, in comparing; I have examined and gone to the depths of all the philosophers of antiquity, apparently so lucid, so luminous; I have found only pride, weakness, darkness, and barrenness. I have recognized that it was all profitless and led to no good; it was always _the man_ that I was finding; and of that I had enough in myself to guide and support. Then I took the Bible, and I felt that it was God who spoke to me from its inspired pages; whereat I abandoned my learning and all those philosophical wranglings which weary the mind without bettering the heart. I go straight to my object without vexing myself with anything. There are things which I do not understand. That is natural, since it has pleased God to conceal them from me. Evidently I do not need to comprehend them, since he has not revealed them; and there is no reason, because I find some obscurities, why I should abandon the light which burns in their midst. ‘Master Clement,’ they ask me, ‘how did God make that?’ ‘Why that?’ My dear friends, this is just as far as we know. ‘And this, again?’ This I know nothing about, because it cannot be explained. When our dear friend More read us his _Utopia_, I remember that I approached him and said: ‘Why have you not founded a people every man of whom followed explicitly the laws of the church? That would have given you a great deal less trouble, and you would at once have arrived at the art of making them happy, without employing other precepts than these: to avoid all wrong-doing, to love their