The trouble with modern progress, from this point of view, is not just that it tends to extinguish the spirit of reverence, as man's accumulated ingenuity gives him the illusion of control over nature, but more specifically that it devalues honest labor, "nature's lawful coin." "Work and live," Emerson exhorts his reader; but honest work is hard to come by. The more we need it, the more it eludes us. An honorable calling, which Emerson regards, in effect, as the everyday form of heroism, helps to reconcile us not merely to everyday disappointments but to the metaphysical terror and pain of existence. We are oppressed by the disparity between our oceanic desires and our satisfactions, which are measured out in "drops"; between our longing for immortality and the certainty of death; between our need to know what will happen to us after death and the impossibility of finding out. In a faithless age, Emerson seems to suggest, the religious spirit lingers on chiefly in the "low curiosity" that makes us demand definitive answers to everything, or again in the nagging speculation about the "origin of evil" that he compares to mumps, measles, and whooping cough—adolescent diseases to which the "simple mind" is immune. "The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses," Emerson says, "is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live."

The "smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times," however, give little encouragement to "honor" and "ancient virtue" or even to the demand for self-respecting employment. In "Man the Reformer" and "The Transcendentalist," essays that attempt to explain and interpret the reform movements and "new views" of the time, Emerson attributes the growing dissatisfaction with existing institutions to the lack of opportunities for honest work. The "practical impediments" confronting "virtuous young men" appear insurmountable. The "way to lucrative employments" is "blocked with abuses." Trade has become "selfish to the borders of theft." To buy a farm "requires a sort of concentration toward money, which is the selling himself for a number of years," against which "genius and virtue" instinctively rebel. "From the liberal professions to

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