"Emerson, Ralph W. - Lecture on the Times" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

unworthy. We arraign our daily employments. They appear to us
unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend on them. In conversation
with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing for our employments;
we speak of them with shame. Nature, literature, science, childhood,
appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily work, not the ripe
fruit and considered labors of man. This beauty which the fancy
finds in everything else, certainly accuses that manner of life we
lead. Why should it be hateful? Why should it contrast thus with
all natural beauty? Why should it not be poetic, and invite and
raise us? Is there a necessity that the works of man should be
sordid? Perhaps not. -- Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs
the effort at the Perfect. It is the interior testimony to a fairer
possibility of life and manners, which agitates society every day
with the offer of some new amendment. If we would make more strict
inquiry concerning its origin, we find ourselves rapidly approaching
the inner boundaries of thought, that term where speech becomes
silence, and science conscience. For the origin of all reform is in
that mysterious fountain of the moral sentiment in man, which, amidst
the natural, ever contains the supernatural for men. That is new and
creative. That is alive. That alone can make a man other than he
is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power.

The new voices in the wilderness crying "Repent," have revived
a hope, which had well nigh perished out of the world, that the
thoughts of the mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy
hour, be executed by the hands. That is the hope, of which all other
hopes are parts. For some ages, these ideas have been consigned to
the poet and musical composer, to the prayers and the sermons of
churches; but the thought, that they can ever have any footing in
real life, seems long since to have been exploded by all judicious
persons. Milton, in his best tract, describes a relation between
religion and the daily occupations, which is true until this time.

"A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits,
finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling
accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going
upon that trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to
be religious; fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that. What
does he, therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find
himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the
whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and
estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole
warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his
custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion;
esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and
commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say, his religion
is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, and
goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the
house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him;
his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and