degenerate fopling, a rake, a fool;--or to you, O butterfly of fashion, sailing with embroidered wings in search of admiration and of pleasure; or still again, to you who have just gathered together the means of enjoyment, and ease, and everything, to make life pleasant, and lo! death has entered, and your hopes are darkened and in the dust; I appeal to you, O types of this streaming humanity, that wears so many masks, yet, carries under all a common heart; and ask you, if there is not some void that no earthly good can fill--that no finite thing can sustain and satisfy? Can you go on with the common business of the world, discharge all its obligations, control yourself in its excitements, resist its evil solicitations, bear up under its trials, and, finally, reach that period in life when you must ask--"What is all this worth?--these years of toil, these eager enterprises, this golden accumulation or unfortunate failure--what are they all worth, and what do they mean?"--can anybody well get along with all this, without Religion? My friends, I say to you that, not consciously, perhaps, like the old saints who wrought and prayed and walked with upward-looking faces--but really, in the deep yearning and the secret gravitation of the soul--you _do_ confess that here we have no continuing city, and you are seeking one to come. At least, it seems to me that without the Help of Religion, there is only the alternative of moral indifference--a cold, hard worldliness, or of recklessness and spiritual despair. And is not this the alternative which is exhibited in the midst of all our civilization--in the midst of this gorgeous materialism of the nineteenth century? Thousands, it is to be apprehended, do exhibit one or the other of those extremes which the poet has so well described: "For most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun's hot eye, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their minds to some unmeaning task-work give, Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall; And so, year after year, Fresh products of their barren labor fall From their tired hands, and rest Never yet comes more near. Gloom settles slowly down over their breast, And while they try to stem The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest, Death in their prison reaches them Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.