If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it.  Such a story as that of Jesus Christ,—­the history of Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History.  The naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills,—­think of it.  In Tasso’s poem I trust some things are sweetly buried.  Consider the snappish tenacity with which they preach Christianity still.  What are time and space to Christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world?—­that the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to make a New York bishop so bigoted.  Forty-four lamps, the gift of kings, now burning in a place called the Holy Sepulchre;—­a church-bell ringing;—­some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on Mount Calvary within the week.—­

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, when I forget thee, may my right hand forget her cunning.”

“By the waters of Babylon there we sat down, and we wept when we remembered Zion.”

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches.  It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.  I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.  “God is the letter Ku, as well as Khu.”  Why need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious?  The simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard Jonah at his own request.—­

   “Where is this love become in later age? 
   Alas! ’tis gone in endless pilgrimage
   From hence, and never to return, I doubt,
   Till revolution wheel those times about.”

One man says,—­

“The world’s a popular disease, that reigns
Within the froward heart and frantic brains
Of poor distempered mortals.”

Another, that

              “all the world’s a stage,
   And all the men and women merely players.”

The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.  Old Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and would be a poet, for instance, should have in him certain “brave, translunary things,” and a “fine madness” should possess his brain.  Certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion.  That is a superfluous wonder, which Dr. Johnson expresses at the assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.”  The wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much.  That would be a rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to Francis Beaumont,—­“Spectators sate part in your tragedies.”

Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it.  This is half our life.  Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all?  And, pray, what more has day to offer?  A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction.  Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.