But evidently the conception of free- trade, on which our Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which they think they have found the secret of national prosperity,-- evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, for this end, of manufactures and population, threatens to create for us, if it has not created already, those vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people,--one pauper, at the present moment, for every nineteen of us,--to the existence of which we are, as we have seen, absolutely forbidden to reconcile ourselves, in spite of all that the philosophy of The Times and the poetry of Mr. Robert Buchanan may say to persuade us. [243] And though Hebraism, following its best and highest instinct,-- identical, as we have seen, with that of Hellenism in its final aim, the aim of perfection,--teaches us this very clearly; and though from Hebraising counsellors,--the Bible, Bishop Wilson, the author of the Imitation,--I have preferred (as well I may, for from this rock of Hebraism we are all hewn!) to draw the texts which we use to bring home to our minds this teaching; yet Hebraism seems powerless, almost as powerless as our free-trading Liberal friends, to deal efficaciously with our ever-accumulating masses of pauperism, and to prevent their accumulating still more. Hebraism builds churches, indeed, for these masses, and sends missionaries among them; above all, it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of The Times, and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable; but with regard to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led to the very same conclusions, though from a point of view of its own, as our free-trading Liberal friends. Hebraism, with that mechanical and misleading use of the letter of Scripture on which we have already commented, is governed by such texts as: Be fruitful and multiply,+ the edict of [244] God's law, as Mr. Chambers would say; or by the declaration of what he would call God's words in the Psalms, that the man who has a great number of children is thereby made happy. And in conjunction with such texts as these it is apt to place another text: The poor shall never cease out of the land.+ Thus Hebraism is conducted to nearly the same notion as the popular mind and as Mr. Robert Buchanan, that children are sent, and that the divine nature takes a delight in swarming the East End of London with paupers. Only, when they are perishing in their helplessness and wretchedness, it asserts the Christian duty of succouring them, instead of saying, like The Times: "Now their brief spring is over; there is nobody to blame for this; it is the result of Nature's simplest laws!" But, like The Times, Hebraism despairs of any help from knowledge and says that "what is wanted is not the light of speculation." I remember, only the other day, a good man, looking with me upon a multitude of