[The Cant]

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THE CANT of the reformers is quite as bare-faced and disgusting in its way as that of other descriptions of trade. Sleek Mawworms cry out from the lecturing-desk against the vice and ignorance and brutality of the masses. These are the moral reformers. Another school—the bouncing, bumptious Bounderby school—inveigh against the filth and disease and neglect of Hygiene among the masses. These are the physical reformers. They preach long discourses and write long-winded articles against ignorance and rum and debauchery. They safely assume that the time is out of joint, and tack to it the bold assumption that it is they who are born to set it right. Each has his hobby. One imagines the millennium would be at hand if a Bible were in every household, or a church or a school house at every corner. Another finds his universal panacea for the ills that flesh is heir to in turning humans into amphibious animals, in deluging their insides and outsides with the liquid element, and in forswearing beef-steak for bran-bread and turnips. Cure yourselves, O physicians, and search not for motes in the eyes of the people, when you cannot see straightly for the beams that blind your own. Think not so brainsickly of things. There is no mental or moral or physical philosopher’s stone that can transmute by its specific virtue the base metal of the diseased into the refined gold of the Normal. There is no magic hey-presto-change! which can snatch the round men from the square holes and the square men from the round holes, and make all right and tight in an instant, in this great old terrestrial ball of ours. If there be balm in Gilead for the correction of abuses and the healing of moral and physical evil, it can be found in no such little doses as you make specialties and hobbies withal. The origin of evil is a question that has puzzled all developed thoughtful minds through all the ages, and it is so deep and dark and mystic a problem that not the wisest of them has ever been able to peer behind one fold of the thick veil. And you approach this mighty mystery, and hold forth in your puny hands your patent “specific” for its cure. With your farthing rush-light you attempt to illumine the illimitable caverns of the infinite. With your favorite (pint) measure, you would ladle out the ocean. It is pitiful. These problems lie so deep, and you approach them so superficially—these questions are so momentous, and you talk of them so childishly! Heaven is so high, and yet you play before it such fantastic tricks! Nature is so calm, so serene, so certain in her workings, and yet you cannot perceive the beauty and the grandeur of the lesson she inculcates. You can accept nothing unquestioned. You place the blatant enthusiast before the reverent philosopher. Fanaticism with you stands in the stead of Faith.