All this was yours! the earth with its fair fruits and innocent creatures;—the firmament with its eternal lights and dutiful seasons;—the men, souls and bodies, your fathers’ true servants for a thousand years,—their lives, and their children’s children’s lives given into your hands, to save or to destroy; their food yours,—as the grazing of the sheep is the shepherd’s; their thoughts yours,—priest and tutor chosen for them by you; their hearts yours,—if you would but so much as know them by sight and name, and give them the passing grace of your own glance, as you dwelt among them, their king. And all this monarchy and glory, all this power and love, all this land and its people, you pitifullest, foulest of Iscariots, sopped to choking with the best of the feast from Christ’s own fingers, you have deliberately sold to the highest bidder;—Christ, and His Poor, and His Paradise together; and instead of sinning only, like poor natural Adam, gathering of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, you, who don’t want to gather it, touch it with a vengeance,—cut it down, and sell the timber. Judases with the big bag—game-bag to wit!—to think how many of your dull Sunday mornings have been spent, for propriety’s sake, looking chiefly at those carved angels blowing trumpets above your family vaults; and never one of you has had Christianity enough in him to think that he might as easily have his moors full of angels as of grouse. And now, if ever you did see a real angel before the Day of Judgment, your first thought would be,—to shoot it. And for your ‘family’ vaults, what will be the use of them to you? Does not Mr. Darwin show you that you can’t wash the slugs out of a lettuce without disrespect to your ancestors? Nay, the ancestors of the modern political economist cannot have been so pure;—they were not—he tells you himself—vegetarian slugs, but carnivorous ones—those, to wit, that you see also carved on your tombstones, going in and out at the eyes of skulls. And truly, I don’t know what else the holes in the heads of modern political economists were made for. If there are any brighter windows in your’s—if any audience chambers—if any council chambers—if any crown of walls that the pin of Death has not yet pierced,—it is time for you to rise to your work, whether you live or die.