Chapter IV

We honor the drudge, but deplore his fate. And yet there are many who believe that there is in fact no other fate for any man; that every business is in the long run a belittling business; that whether you are a hodcarrier or a poet, as you go on in your calling, "shades of the prison-house" will close upon you and custom lie upon you "heavy as frost and deep almost as life."

Let us look at this deep pessimism at its darkest. The imperfect, that is everywhere. That is all that you can see or work at. That is the warp and woof of all your occupations and institutions, your politics, your science, your religion. They are all nearly as bad as they are good. Your science has forever to disown its past. Your politics demands that you shall be _particeps criminis_ in its evil as the price of a position in which you can exert any influence. Your historic church is almost as full of Satan as of Christ. And when you have spent your bit of life in any of these institutions or occupations, they are not perfect as you had hoped.

You emancipate the slaves and the negro question still looks you in the face. You invent printing and then must say with Browning's Fust, "Have I brought man advantage or hatched so to speak a strange serpent?"

You establish a new brotherhood for the love of Christ, and presently they are quarreling which shall be chief or perhaps haling men to prison in the name of Him who came to let the oppressed go free.

And you, yourself, for reward will be filled with the Everlasting Imperfect which your eyes have seen and your hands have handled.

The essential tragedy of life, according to this deep pessimism, is not in pain and defeat, but in the emptiness and vanity of all that we call victory.

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the
labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and
vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.