To complete the list of false estimates of good, refuted by one test, we should allude to the frivolities of gentility and fashion-the passion for wearing badges of distinction, however impotent or unmeaning such may be.  This is the very poorest form of finding delight, in what from the nature of the case can be shared by few.  For its incommunicableness is its only recommendation.  It is an icy repellant, freezing up the kindly flow of sympathy with universal humanity; and uncompensated loss of that best ingredient of earthly felicity—­the interchange of friendly feelings and offices; that store of wealth, from which the more that take, and the fuller their share, the more they leave to be taken by others.

The foregoing may be treated as a fine and just speculation, but as what ever must remain a barren speculation; as if it were after the example of all ages, that men should mistake the material of happiness for happiness itself.  So it always has been, so it always will be, that false notions of good usurp the place of the true, despite the demonstrations of moralists and divines to the contrary.

Mind, however, has not stood still in this matter.  It has moved, and that in the right direction.  We may note a progress from age to age, in coming to a just estimate of life.  Start not at the use of terms, rendered suspicious by the extravagancies of which they have been made the vehicle.  But we must not reject ideas great, just, or new, because of the distortions and caricatures of little minds.  If one idea occupies the mind all them more for being great and just, it will be likely to overmaster that mind, so as not to be produced in its fair proportions, or rightly applied.  So fare they, with whom the one idea is, the progress of society—­the growth of thought.  The Mississippi in its progress throws froth and scum on its surface, more conspicuous than the under-running current.  So radical folly and transcendental nonsense is obtruded on the sight, from the sympathy of little minds with the deeper current of thought.  To gauge the progress of mind from those who are most noisy on the matter, would be, like taking the direction and rapidity of the Mississippi, from the froth, which the wind blows hither and thither over its surface.

“Let us go on to perfection”—­“Forgetting the things behind, and pressing onward to the things before.”  Such language describes distinctively the American character, and the spirit of Christianity.  Only, where is perfection?  What are the things before?  If, as a people, we do fully take these expressions in their author’s sense, we may hope there is one element of agreement, betokening good for the future.