On the contrary,Nature keeps silently a most exact Savings-bank,and official register correct to the most evanescent item,Debtor and Creditor,in respect to one and all of us;silently marks down,Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism;Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder,twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong,and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in consequence of that,--Debtor,Debtor,Debtor,day after day,rigorously as Fate (for this is Fate that is writing);and at the end of the account you will have it all to pay,my friend;there is the rub!the infinitesimalest fraction of a farthing but will be found marked there,for you and against you;and with the due rate of interest you will have to pay it,neatly,completely,as sure as you are alive.You will have to pay it even in money if you live:--and,poor slave,do you think there is payment but in money?There is a payment which Nature rigorously exacts of men,and also of Nations,and this I think when her wrath is sternest,in the shape of dooming you to possess money.To possess it;to have your bloated vanities fostered into monstrosity by it,your foul passions blown into explosion by it,your heart and perhaps your very stomach ruined with intoxication by it;your poor life and all its manful activities stunned into frenzy and comatose sleep by it,--in one word,as the old Prophets said,your soul forever lost by it.Your soul;so that,through the Eternities,you shall have soul,or manful trace of ever having had a soul;but only,for certain fleeting moments,shall have had a money-bag,and have given soul and heart and (frightfuler still)stomach itself in fatal exchange for the same.You wretched mortal,stumbling about in a God's Temple,and thinking it a brutal Cookery-shop!Nature,when her scorn of a slave is divinest,and blazes like the blinding lightning against his slavehood,often egh flings him a bag of money,silently saying:"That!Away;thy doom is that!"--For man,and for body or biggest multitude of men,has Nature favor,if they part company with her facts and her.
Excellent stump-orator;eloquent parliamentary dead-dog,making motions,passing bills;reported in the Morning Newspapers,and reputed the "best speaker going"?From the Universe of Fact he has turned himself away;he is gone into partnership with the Universe of Phantasm;finds it profitablest to deal in forged es,while the foolish shopkeepers will accept them.Nature for such a man,and for Nations that follow such,has her patibulary forks,and prisons of death everlasting:--dost thou doubt it?Unhappy mortal,Nature otherwise were herself a Chaos and Cosmos.Nature was made by an Impostor;she,Ithink,rife as they are!--In fact,by money or otherwise,to the uttermost fraction of a calculable and incalculable value,we have,each one of us,to settle the exact balance in the above-said Savings-bank,or official register kept by Nature:
Creditor by the quantity of veracities we have done,Debtor by the quantity of falsities and errors;there is ,by any conceivable device,the faintest hope of escape from that issue for one of us,for all of us.
This used to be a well-kn fact;and daily still,in certain edifices,steeple-houses,joss-houses,temples sacred or other,everywhere spread over the world,we hear some dim mumblement of an assertion that such is still,what it was always and will forever be,the fact:but meseems it has terribly fallen out of memory nevertheless;and,from Dan to Beersheba,one in vain looks out for a man that really in his heart believes it.In his heart he believes,as we perceive,that scrip will yield dividends:but that Heaven too has an office of account,and unerringly marks down,against us or for us,whatsoever thing we do or say or think,and treasures up the same in regard to every creature,--this I do so well perceive that he believes.
Poor blockhead,he reckons that all payment is in money,or approximately representable by money;finds money go a strange course;disbelieves the parson and his Day of Judgment;discerns that there is any judgment except in the small or big debt court;and lives (for the present)on that strange footing in this Universe.The unhappy mortal,what is the use of his "civilizations"and his "useful kledges,"if he have forgotten that beginning of human kledge;the earliest perception of the awakened human soul in this world;the first dictate of Heaven's inspiration to all men?I can account him a man any more;but only a kind of human beaver,who has acquired the art of ciphering.He lives without rushing hourly towards suicide,because his soul,with all its le aspirations and imaginations,is sunk at the bottom of his stomach,and lies torpid there,unaspiring,unimagining,unconsidering,as if it were the vital principle of a mere four -footed beaver.A soul of a man,appointed for spinning cotton and making money,or,alas,for merely shooting grouse and gathering rent;to whom Eternity and Immortality,and all human lenesses and divine Facts that did tell upon the stock-exchange,were meaningless fables,empty as the inarticulate wind.
