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of understanding him, and they should have employed those means. This is his way of saying, "Every man is responsible for the use of his own faculties in ascertaining all the truth which is necessary for his conduct. You have eyes; why do you not see? You have ears, why do you not hear?-these senses standing for faculties at large.

Men are equipped with all necessary faculties for their guidance, both in the physical and in the moral world, and they are practically held responsible, in consequence, for the right use of their faculties, and for right judgments formed by means of them. However many helps there may be in the world, there are no substitutes for a man's own judgment and choice and action. However many things there may be in which men may transfer a part of themselves, as it were, to others, there is a central element in every man that is untransferable; and every man must stand for himself, think for himself, find out truth for himself, and follow for himself that which is found out. Whoever may help him, and whatever may throw light upon the problem, are collateral. He is the principal. And this is not the law of certain prominent and strong men: it is a law which belongs to the race. the moral economy under which all natural laws are administered in their relations to men; under which all civil laws are administered; under which all moral laws are administered.

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This is a principle so profound, and it touches so many questions, that I shall feel at liberty to go into it a little more at length before I make the applications of it.

Responsible individualism is the constituent element of government and of society, whether you regard society as framed of God, or as fashioned of man. It is not, then, the design of things that a man should simply go right; because if to go right had been all that was meant, it would have been far easier to make all men go right by making them differently. No puppet goes wrong. Make a doll, put the machinery to it, and turn the crank, and it will go just as you mean it shall, every time, for a hundred times, and never make a mistake; but it is a puppet when you have got through--no more, and no less. And if men's merely going right had been all that was desired, they could have been made after a very different pattern. And there might have been a great economy of materials practiced. Far less would be necessary to make a man that should simply go when the crank was turned. If that had been all that was needed, perfect men could very easily have been made. People seem to think that to live about right is all that is required. Not at all. That is not the end. Living right is only the means to an end. It is an incident to something greater. The divine idea in the creation of the world, seems to me to be manhood-bulk of being, variety of being, power of being. And going

right is simply the way by which men are to come to that augmented being.

That men should find out what is right, therefore, and learn how to fulfill what they find out, is as important as that they should go right. It is the finding out that makes men grow. It is the exertion to do what you have ascertained against difficulties, that proves, develops, forms and authenticates manhood. For, to be a self-centered individual, plenary in reason and moral sense, to be like God-that is the design which God says he is working out in man, in the heaven, and upon earth. And the method by which he works men toward that grand design is to lay on every man the responsibility of using the faculties with which he has been endowed, in their own spheres; putting him to find out the truth, to guide himself by that which he finds out; giving him ample helps, collateral suggestions, pattern, counsel and law, giving him none of these things in such a peremptory form as to supersede his own individual liberty and responsibility for finding that which is right, and then doing that which he has found out.

This is true of our senses, and of all their commerce in the natural world. Our eye, our ear, our hand may be trained; but after all, there is no training, there can be no training, there never was any training, which did not leave the individual responsibility untouched. If a man says, "To my eyes that is level," when it is precipitous, and I accept his sight in lieu of my own, and walk over the precipice, I tumble to the bottom none the less because I take his sight instead of my own. If a man says, "It is two yards," and I stand just a yard from him as he swings a whip, I none the less take the whip because I believe him instead of believing myself. It is for me to see, and to follow my seeing. I may help myself; I may get what light I can from sources outside of myself; I may form my judgment in any complex case by the assistance of other people's senses; but, after all, I am the pope of my own senses; I am the sovereign of my own faculties; and it is designed, either that I should form a judgment, and act according to it, or that I should take the penalties and the consequences. And all the early part of our life is spent in learning how to use our senses; in learning how to be a being. The child grows first by learning how himself to use every muscle, every bone, every limb; how then to use those higher senses which stand intimately connected with mentality; and how, afterwards, little by little, having gone from sensuousness to intelligence, to go from mere intelligence to sentiment, and from sentiment to moral sentiment, or to that which is right, and not to that which is fact alone.

I do not undertake to say that we may not derive great benefit from the foregoing example of others; from what they have learned. Books

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may help us train our senses; but no book, and no teacher, and no person outside of me can ever dispossess me of this, that I am primarily set to find out by the use of my senses all the truth that belongs to the sphere in which they act. The sovereignty of the individual—a term very much abused, and yet a term that may convey a correct idea-is asserted throughout every sphere of man's action.

It is the same in the transaction of secular business. It is the best way, although it is the hardest way, to hold every person responsible for his self-helpfulness, for his individual correctness of judgment, and individual correctness of measures or means applied to ends. Men seek to find out ways which shall release them from liability to mistakes. They marvel, frequently, that there have not been such ways found out. They think that when the millennial day comes, things will be so organized in this world that all things will come symmetrically, and that men will come into affairs naturally, peacefully, happily, every man finding everything done to hand, or else the doing of it being so natural and so easy that he will have no thought, no care, no ache, no study, no responsibility. Never: never: NEVER!

If iron is to be made into a tool, it has to go into the fire, and on to the anvil. Otherwise a tool can never be made of it. And there never will come a day in which a man can be made into a man, while the economy of this world lasts, except by going into the fire, and on to the anvil, and under the hammer. Manhood, if it comes at all, must come through a great many mistakes, and a good deal of pain from those mistakes.

Now, take a man in business. If he is readily expert in that business, and he becomes so by easy ways, it must be a very simple business. No man ever becomes, in secular affairs, broad, multifarious in power, eminent and pre-eminent, except it be by a tentative series of endeavors; except it be by a probation which implies perplexity, mistake, blunder, a thousand painful forms of experience.

Is that necessary? Was it necessary to the original conception of such a world as God was pleased to create? It certainly is the fact in respect to this world that he did create. What other worlds he may may have created, I do not know; but so far as this world is concerned the divine law is in that direction. It is laying the responsibility upon all the powers of a man, in his secular affairs, of finding out the truth, of ascertaining that which is right. The skillful, the lucrative, the honorable, the pleasurable-all these things are found out. And after the world has been finding out for six thousand years and more, no man can be born now, and not have to find out just as much as they did who were of the first generation. For no man ever transmitted his experience to anybody else. Really an experience does not become mine till I have realized it in my own action.

A father brings up his children. He has gone through the school of experience. He has committed innumerable mistakes: and he can point to this or that mistake and save the child from it, and so abbreviate his course. But there is one thing that parents never can do: they never can bring up their child so that he will be a skillful man of the world, without suffering; without committing blunders; without falling into endless mistakes; without having been obliged to ply to the very root his own faculties, his observation, his judgment and his will. That you cannot help. Everybody must go through that school or else he has no business in this world.

It is precisely the same in civil life. A government that thinks for its people, or that undertakes to think for them, dwarfs them at once, Such a government is what is called a paternal government, and is the fool's ideal of a government. It is a government of fatuity. It is a government that thinks just how its people ought to act, and then lays down all its thoughts in exact concatenation, and then has physical motives by which the whole people train as if they were but a machine. Such a government may be called paternal, and men may admire the order of such a government; but it has no education in it. It has no developing power in it. It is a machine, and it makes men machines. And there never was an ecclesiastical or civil government that undertook to think for men, and tell them how to think, and to act for them, and tell them how to act, that it did not take from them the power of thinking and acting to any purpose. There was never a government of Church or State that took from men the necessity of individual responsibility, that made men that were worth having.

As I shall show, the sublimest undertaking of it was in the Jewish economy. "What the law could not do in that it was weak," says the apostle. It was a trial and a failure. And if that failed, there is nothing else of the sort that will ever succeed. But I shall speak more at length upon that in a few moments.

Minute rules for conduct, for the sake of superseding personal responsibility on the part of every single citizen, makes machine-men. It seems easier to live in such a way as this. Men think it abbreviates the processes of life. But then, it generates a life that is not worth having. It is not in analogy with nature. It is not the design of nature to make a grand city, but to make grand citizens. It is not important that there should be a magnificent nation, but it is important that the individual elements of the nation should be large, and selfhelpful, and vital in thought and in purpose. Yet, time and history have run perpetually to making, not full men, but something less than men. Churches, cities, nations, have been built up as if the aggregate name was a more important thing than the special element. It is the

same in our moral sphere. Principles are given to us. Men find out the applications of these principles on every side, in themselves, in their fellow men, in their minor organizations, and in their larger reach, for time and for eternity. The responsibility is laid on us, not simply of finding out what has been told us, but of finding out a great deal that has not been told us. We are not to suppose that men are to be left absolutely alone in such a world as this without any helps; without any foregoing experience, recorded and reported; without any guides whatever. But in all cases the man is the superior-not the guide. He is not to be judged by, but is to judge his creed, his church, and his conduct. Man is superior to his circumstances. I do not say in point of view, but I do say in point of ideal, this is the design of God, plainly indicated. All helps are good, except the helps that smother self-help. All helps are to be employed as so many excitants of one's self. All other men's thinkings are good for you if they make you think. If they overlay your thoughts with what is called "knowledge," they are bad for you. Other men's thoughts are like manure on farmed soil, not designed to be the thing that is good, but to stimulate to the production of that which is good. And so all teaching, and all thinking, and all guiding, and all experience given to man, are given to him only as so many stimulants to develop in him more power than he would have had without them.

they are making him work; but or substitute something else for it. not governors.

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And they are doing their work when not when they supersede his work, These things are helps, therefore

There is an exception in cases where a man is not a man. A child is to be helped. During the time that he is an animal, and not a man, the experience of the parent is to be substituted for his lack of experi And we do not let him come into this reasoning at all. There is only one other exception, namely, that of persons who are children all their life long-for there are some so weak that they never outgrow being children, and go out of life the same size as they came into it. I admit that there is to be an economy in every wise society, to take care of the feeble-the feeble-minded.

But these are always abnormal, exceptional cases; whereas, the great principle goes on, that it is the divine idea of the development of man to bring to bear upon him such stimulating influences as shall compel him, having eyes, to see, having ears, to hear, and having reasoning faculties, to think, so that he shall be educated, and self-edu cated, and be made more a man by that very process of development. Now for some applications.

The first is, to throw light on democratic governments, and also on absolute governments, of which latter we have had a very lively

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