It is worth while to observe, in that first chapter on Fate, how admirably Emerson provides for the exercise of a free activity in every man. 'Every spirit makes its house, but afterward the house confines the spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism, 'To make the absolute best of what God made,' to sharpen every faculty, expand every capacity, and bow only to the Eternal. AEterna aeternus tribuit, mortalia confert Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus.' Here is the choice, eternal or mortal, divine or perishable. This drives men to seek their Paradise in Culture. Well, they find in it a Beulah, and beyond rolls the Jordan of the soul. Men have made a dwarfed Providence to suit their dwarfed aims, an amorphous Deity, whose attributes are imperfect, disproportioned. But yesterday I heard a Frenchman, who has no acquaintance with our literature and never heard of Emerson, say, 'God, with the multitude, is no more than a feeble old man, whose whims and whose age we must respect. What is to become of his high claims upon creatures who are to work out an infinite purpose? _Il faut honorer la vieillesse?_ Emerson had anticipated this with his 'pistareen Providence, dressed in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity;' yet it proves that minds are arriving by widely diverging paths at the same truths.