Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. WorksHolmes, Oliver Wendell
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Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American literature; Literature -- Collections
--I have a creed,--I replied;--none better, and none shorter. It
is told in two words,--the two first of the Paternoster. And when
I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will
to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral
obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to
express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings
is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief
planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the
will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to
nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but "Give me
neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in
getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these
every-day working forces into account. The great theological
question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is
this:-
No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be
repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what
personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business
has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-
table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the
Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto
"Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand
theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not
at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
time to express an opinion on theological matters.
I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of
thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two
letters a week, requesting him to. . . . ,--on the strength of some
youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent
constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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