A MORAL MYSTERY.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2486, 16 June 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

A MORAL MYSTERY.

What a monstrous spectre is this man, of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing , , bringing forth email copies of himself ; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes which move and glitter in his face ; a thing to set children sr-.reaming ; and yet looked at nearer, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes ! Poor soul, hero for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires ho incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely fathered, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives; who should have blamed him hnd ho been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look abroad and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues; infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of deity ; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea ; singling out his friends and his mate with the most cordial affection ; bringing forth in puin, and rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch at once the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunaoy : the thought of duty, the thought of some thing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God ; an ideal of deoency, to which he would rise if it wore possible ; a limit of shame, below which, if it bo possible, he will not stoop. Tho design in most men is one o,f conformity ; here and there in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence ; but in all, iti their degrees, it is a bosom thought. Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs aud cats, whom wo know fairly well, and doubtless the like point of honour swaya the elephant, the oyster, and tho louse, of whom we know so little.

OUT OF THE DEI'THS of all earth's meteors, hero at least is the most strange and consoling; that this ennobled lumar, this hair crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few fears and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare deliiiht*, aud add to his frequent pains; and live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor enu we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step further into tho heart of this rough but noble universe, Far nowadays the pricje of mau denies In vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus ; and in him, too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Docs it stop with the dog ? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant j a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce comprehend hia doings; and here, also, in his ordered politics and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin.—Robert L. Stevenson.