Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe.  The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,—­and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price,—­is not less sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature.  I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop bill as in the history of a state,—­do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice.  The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor.  He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.  Commit a crime,[134] and the earth is made of glass.  Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.  You cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew.  Some damning circumstance always transpires.  The laws and substances of nature—­water, snow, wind, gravitation—­become penalties to the thief.

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action.  Love, and you shall be loved.  All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.  The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense, poverty, prove benefactors:—­

              “Winds blow and waters roll
    Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
    Yet in themselves are nothing.”

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect.  As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him.  The stag in the fable[136] admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him.  Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.  As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same.  Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society?  Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.