Here, reader, I beg your patience a moment, while I make a just compliment to the great wisdom and sagacity of our law, which refuses to admit the evidence of a Son for or against his Father. This would be the means of creating an eternal dissension between them. It would, indeed, be the means of much perjury, and of much whipping, fining, imprisoning, transporting, and hanging. The loving Father God would destroy his son and unleash hell on Earth. The Alpha—God, when then turn into the Omega—Satan. Even an innocent man must take ordinary precautions to defend himself. Never mind the character, and stick to the alleybi. Nothing like an alleybi, nothing. Take this book in your right hand, this is your name and handwriting, you swear that the contents of this your affidavit are true, so help you God, a shilling you must get change I have not got it. It will probably be objected that imperfections do not rest in the laws themselves, but in the ill execution of them; but this appears to be no less an absurdity than to say of any machine that it is excellently made, though incapable of performing its functions. To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail they involve. One of nature’s beacons, warning off those who navigated the shoals and breakers of the World, or of that dangerous strait the Law, and admonishing them to seek less treacherous harbors and try their fortune elsewhere.

  Nothing can be more demoralizing in the long run than lynch law. And yet lynch law often originates in a burst of generous indignation which is not willing to suffer a bold oppressor to escape by means of corrupt and cowardly courts. It will be much wiser to submit to a few inconveniences arising from dispassionate deafness of laws, than to remedy them by applying to the passionate open ears of a tyrant. Once again, the kingdom of Heaven is like a time traveling machine that will take people to an elevated consciousness where peace and happiness is possible for all, but those who are knowingly bad will be thrown away. This is how it will be at end of the age. The angels will appear and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw those who hurt others on purpose into a fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Have you understood all of these things? Therefore, every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of Heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as antiquated. Be allured, if you will, by everything lovely, but draw not nigh unless by righteousness. You shall not better your situation save by honest labor. To take the risks in human interaction means to have a certain amount of self-confidence and respect for your ability to follow through with whatever might happen in the relating. You can show the good self-image of yourself to others and hope they will accept it and respond in the same way. They may not. However, in any case you will have been real, and there is usually no harm done.

The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long-anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities. Our imagination has dressed up a phantom to impose on our reason. We fall in love with the offspring of our brain. Three hundred miles beyond the end of the telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and are reborn, into pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art. Your imagination prevails over your skill, and you tell rather what you wish than what you know. He who has nothing external that can divert him must fund pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not, for who is pleased with what he is? There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort. Human bees will swarm to the beating of any old tin kettle; in that fact lies the complete manual of governing them. When they can be got to believe that the kettle is made of the precious metals, in that fact is the whole power of [those who can take them in]. Human government, being subordinate to the divine, must require, therefore, in its degree, partake of the characteristics of the divine.