It is not easy to produce a good sermon; but neither is it easy to make a good boot. Skill, much skill is necessary to do either, and bunglers and botchers had better keep their hands off, if they have any regard for their fellow-men's welfare. I, for my part, have an uncommon partiality for shoemakers, in their totality when they march in holiday parades as well as for the individuals. As the people say, they are a "ruminating tribe," and no other trade produces such excellent and odd peculiarities in the members of its guild. The low work-table, the low stool, the glass globe filled with water which catches the light of the little oil lamp and reflects it with greater brilliance, the pungent odor of leather and of pitch must naturally exert a lasting effect on human nature, and that is just what they do, and powerfully too. What curious originals this admirable trade has produced! A whole library could be written about "remarkable shoemakers" without the materials being in the least exhausted! The light which falls through the hanging glass globe onto the work-table is the realm of fantastic spirits; during the meditative work it fills the imagination with strange figures and pictures and gives to thought a tinge that no other lamp, patented or unpatented, can lend it. It makes one think of all sorts of rhymes, queer legends, marvelous tales and merry and sad events of the world which, when they have once been put on paper by an unpractised hand, amaze the neighbors; at which the shoemaker's wife laughs or is afraid when her husband hums them in a low voice in the dusk. Or, perhaps, we begin to ponder still deeper, we feel the necessity of "unraveling life's beginning." Deeper and deeper we look into the glowing globe, and in the glass we see the universe in all its forms and natures: we pass freely through the portals of all the heavens and know them with all their stars and elements; intuitive perception opens our minds to sublime visions and we write them down while Pastor Richter, head clergyman of the parish, stirs up the mob against us from the pulpit and the constable of Goerlitz, who is to fetch us to prison, stands before the door. "For this is eternity's right and eternal existence, that it has only _one_ will. If it had two one would break the other and there would be strife. It is indeed great in strength and miraculousness; but its life is but love alone, from which light and majesty emanate. All creatures in Heaven have _one_ will, and that is directed to God's own heart and lives in God's own spirit, in the centre of multiplicity, in growing and blooming; but God's spirit is life in all things, _Centrum Naturæ_ gives being, majesty and power, and the Holy Ghost is the leader."