From “Past and Present.”

THE LATEST Gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it. “Know thyself”; long enough has that poor “self” of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to “know” it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

  It has been written “an endless significance lies in work”; as man perfects himself by writing. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but as he bends himself with free valor against his task, all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring afar off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labor in him, is it not a purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame?

  Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless Chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round, compacted World. What would become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter’s wheel, one of the venerablest objects; old as the prophet Ezekiel, and far older? Rude lumps of clay; how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel, reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch, a mere enameled vessel of dishonor! Let the idle think of this.

  Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How as the free flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one’s existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows; draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear, flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor is life; from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence, breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, “self-knowledge,” and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge! the knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working; the rest is yet all an hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic vortices, till we try it and fix it. “Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone.”