T has in all times been a part of our creed to think sadly upon our human estate, which is the gift of God, and to consider ourselves no better than bondmen till we be free of our carnal husk. The growing voice of ages has proclaimed this wretched investiture of flesh to be a continuous evil, so that with the cloud of witnesses we have come to take it for a common axiom of life. Yet upon the facts this would seem a foolish assumption, and may indeed be rebutted as an error of the supersensitive. Perhaps it is the Christian faith that has most favoured the error; yet such as Socrates had the same thought, and we should rather regard it as succeeding naturally to a sympathetic contemplation of human suffering. So long have our philosophers impressed upon us that we live at war, in a plenitude of sorrows and losses, distraught with the horrors of our environment, agape upon the sudden breaches in our immediate ranks, that almost any one of us may now, upon provocation, fall to tears at the moral of it. And yet were it only true that man had this agony of life for a constant purview, poor Nature had long since succumbed to the wretched neighbourhood; there had been no duty more sacred, as no prospect more inviting, than the release of the frail tenant from the frailer clay. Philosopher and theologian have held life to be nothing but a toilsome pilgrimage to some peaceful bourne—it may be Paradise, or haply oblivion. The balance (they have both declared) is against us here; but (quoth the one) it shall be readjusted upon the dissolution of our mortal frame; while the other has looked oftener to a restitution in the conclusion of death. Must we, then, confess to this grotesque subservience to a shadowy faith, or to a grim patience? Surely, were the balance ever against us, the soul had determined its own miseries upon the first appreciation of the horrid iniquity. We are surely to say that there are all but none to whom this existence has sincerely seemed intolerable; nay, that there are few that have not judged it, at the worst, a pleasing tragicomedy with an impertinent ending. Yet should you go by their open professions this were not so. How glibly falls from the tongue the deprecation of a thing so shameful and unworthy! It is possible to take no pride in life, if we be rightly minded. At each turn we hold up our hands and lengthen our faces upon the knowledge that we are still in travail. We shake our heads upon a calamity, remarking how truly sorrow is our portion. But withal this profession is, as it were, a mere habit of the outward features, as you may grimace at the conception of a pain you have not felt. In the life it is but an hypothesis, a supposition of our fathers which it is seemly to acknowledge upon decent occasions.