It quivers on the boundary of these things,
sometimes leaning one way sometimes the other, to suit the
literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is,
though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust
it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance
straight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave
utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature:
"If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem
escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always
restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It
is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors
and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave
the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line,
and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be
pulverized by the recoil."[11]
[11] Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that
underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer
to their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious
experiences.
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