The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives, would be,--"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,--never consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself." But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the book. This is said sovereignly by _not_ being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to question it. The last persuasion lies in assumptions,--not in assumptions made consciously and with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"--nor even, "God is our Father,"--nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new truth to this degree,--made it for him an _inevitable_ assumption--then there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and is a soul of eloquence in his book. Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment. Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all, to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a sovereign energy, into his heart,--and then, as it were, compelling his heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed, he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made his chief reproach.