The frequent, not to say ordinary, disproportion between moral worth and worldly prosperity has at all times led the observant and reflecting few to a nicer consideration of the current belief, whether instinctive or traditional. By forcing the soul in upon herself, this enigma of saint and sage, from Job, David, and Solomon to Claudian and Boëtius, this perplexing disparity of success and desert, has been the occasion of a steadier and more distinct consciousness of a something in man, different in kind, which distinguishes and contra-distinguishes him from animals--at the same time that it has brought into closer view an enigma of yet harder solution--the fact, I mean, of a contradiction in the human being, of which no traces are observable elsewhere, in animated or inanimate nature. A struggle of jarring impulses; a mysterious division between the injunctions of the mind and the elections of the will; and the utter incommensurateness and the unsatisfying qualities of the things around us, that yet are the only objects which our senses discover or our appetites require us to pursue; these facts suggest that the riddle of fortune and circumstance is but a form of the riddle of man, and that the solution of both problems lies in the acknowledgement that the soul of man, as the subject of mind and will, possesses a principle of permanence and is destined to endure. Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own evidence--remembering only the express declaration of Christ himself, "No man cometh to Me, unless the Father leadeth him." Christ's awful recalling of the drowsed soul from the dreams and phantom world of sensuality to actual reality--how has it been evaded! His word, that was spirit! His mysteries, which even the apostles must wait for the parable in order to comprehend! These spiritual things, which can only be spiritually discerned, were--say some--mere metaphors! Figures of speech! Oriental hyperboles! "All this means only morality!" Ah! how far nearer the truth to say that morality means all this! * * * * * CONFUCIANISM THE LUN YU, OR SAYINGS OF CONFUCIUS