A Prophet In His Own Country

in him, need tempering with tact; or seem to do so. Secondly, his utterances are often obscure, or seem to be obscure. They are not really so. But where a thoroughly sophisticated mind, nursed on false premises and schooled in sophistries, receives the impact of the prophetic intelligence, it is bewildered by the simplicity of that intelligence. One is reminded of the story of charlatans who proposed to weave for the emperor a robe which should be visible only to the innocent. They made no robe at all. But the emperor and all his ministers had to pretend that they saw one; and the fraud passed undetected until a child in the street cried out: “But the King is naked!” Nowadays, however, people are not so easily undeceived. The child would very likely not be understood. The word “naked” is not in the vocabulary of the fashionable dressmaker; besides which, the word is improper. We know that there are no such things! So that even if a dawning perception of the meaning of the prophet strikes the more enlightened minds, it is often put aside with a sort of horror; although that word has been awaited with yearning and anxiety. Now it must be confessed that this objection does to some extent apply to the writings which we have under consideration. Mr. Stuart’s style is as difficult as Wagner’s or Whistler’s were to their contemporaries. We have acquiesced so long in the false meanings which have been placed upon the simplest words by those whose interest it is to deceive us, that when those words are used in their proper, simple sense, we hardly recognize them. For this reason we have deemed it necessary to