In proof of this, we may appeal to the occurrences of every day. Our great cities are shadowed over by the giant forms of vice and crime. Like a thick cloud, ignorance, dense and dark, pervades the land. Ascending higher to the well-to-do classes, we find bodily comfort to be the great end of life; we find everything that can conduce to its realization is understood—that the priests and ministers of the sensual are well paid—that a good cook, like a diamond, has always value in the market. M. Soyer, as cook, in the Reform Club, pocketed, we believe, £800 a year. Hood, in the dark days of his life, when weakened by the fierce struggle with the world and its wants, became the prey of the spoiler, and would have died of starvation had not Government granted him a pension. Many a man, in whose breast genius was a presence and a power has been suffered to pine and starve; but who ever heard of a cook dying of starvation? How is it, then, that such is the case, that so much is done for the body, and so little for the mind? that at this time the teacher of spiritual realities can but at best scrape together as much salary as a lawyer’s clerk? We are not speaking now of wealthy fellows who repose on beds of roses, but of the busy earnest men who from the pulpit, or the press, or the schoolmaster’s desk, proclaim the morality and truth without which society would become a mass of corruption and death. How is it that they are overlooked, and that honour is paid to the soldier who gives up his moral responsibility, and does the devil’s work upon condition that food and raiment be granted him—to mere wealth and rank—to what is accidental rather than to what is true and valuable in life? The truth is our civilization is hardly worthy of the name? We may say, in the language of Scripture, we have not attained, neither are we already perfect. We have but just seen the dim grey of morn, and we boast that we bask in the sunshine of unclouded day. Our commercial morality brands our civilization with a voice of thunder, as an imposture and a sham.