anywhere,--under anything or anybody,--if they are promised nourishment at the end of the journey. And the Soul of the Nation is, at this present period of time, starving to the point of inanition in all forms of spiritual food. The Good Shepherd gave His life for the sheep, but the underlings who care not for the flock have let the wolves into the fold. A thing which would appear to be frequently forgotten by those who hold Governmental authority, is that the most vital, most powerful and most active principle of a Nation is this spark of the Divine which for want of any clearer mode of description we call the Soul. The Soul of a single individual man or woman is the mere copy in miniature of the Soul of a race, or the Soul of a world. An involuntary, half-conscious, but nevertheless resistless impetus towards ultimate Good is the Soul’s original quality and inborn Ideal. For, if the human weakness of the fleshly creature impel it towards temporary phases of evil, sooner or later the Soul will set to work to pull it out of the stifling quagmire. Material Nature is, as we all know, a remedial agent, and wherever mischief is wrought she seeks to amend it. Spiritual Nature is a still stronger healer. For every injury self-inflicted or wrought by others on the immortal Soul she has a saving balm,--and for every inch of progress which the Soul essays to make along the lines leading to good, she helps it forward a mile. Individuals find this out very soon in their own personal experience,--Nations discover it more slowly, first, because they have a longer time to live and learn than the individual unit,--and secondly because, moving in great masses, their periods of transit from one epoch of civilization to another must necessarily be more laborious and difficult. But in all epochs, in all eras, the Soul wins. The fiery leaven which is of God, works through the lump in various strange and complex forms till the whole is leavened. And those nations in which the Soul, or Spirit of the Ideal, is crushed and kept down by the iron hand of Materialism, are very soon seen to fall back in the rear of progress,--so far back indeed that we are fain to speak of them as “decaying nations,” though of a truth no decay is possible to them, but only temporary retrogression, which will in due course revert to progress again when the Soul is once more allowed to have its way. But Governments whose common law of procedure is to put this Soul or “spirit of the Ideal,” in the background as a kind of myth or chimera, and who seek to settle everything pertaining to the interests of the people by what they term “practical” methods, (which often prove wholly _un_practical,) are naturally prone to forget that whatever they do, whatever they say, the busy Soul of the Nation is altogether outside and above them, fighting for itself, often desperately and piteously, and struggling to make use of its wings and rise higher and ever higher despite its hobbles of iron and feet of