2. Great Poverty.--Can a man live the highest life when the preservation of his stunted, unlovely body occupies all his thoughts--from whose life pleasure is crushed out by ever-wearying work--to whom thought is impossible (the brain needs food and leisure to set it going)--to whom knowledge, one of the prophets of the nineteenth century and a revealer of the Most High, is denied? 3. Unequal Laws.--Is a man wholly unfettered in his choice of life when his country’s laws have allowed him to become a victim to unsanitary dwellings--when they permit him to sin, by providing that his wrong should (on himself) be resultless--when its ministers of justice, interpreting its laws, declare in the strong tones of action that bread-stealing is more wicked than wife-beating? Or is the highest life made more possible by laws that allow so much of our great mother earth--God-blessed for the use of mankind--to be reserved for the exclusive benefit and enjoyment of the upper classes? 4. Division of Classes.--Love is the strongest force in the universe. At least the ancient teachers thought so when they renamed God, and left Him with the Christian name of Love. But love, a certain kind of love for which no other makes up, becomes impossible by the great division between classes. We cannot love what we do not know; it is as the American said, ‘Oh, Jones! I hate that fellow.’ ‘Hate him?’ asked his friend; ‘why, I did not think you knew him.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ was the reply; ‘if I did, I guess I shouldn’t hate him.’ The division between classes is a wrong to both classes. The poor lose something by their ignorance of the grace, the culture, and the wider interests of the rich; the rich lose far more by their ignorance of the patience, the meekness, the unself-consciousness, the self-sacrifice, and the great strong hopefulness of the poor. 5. Besides these conditions, others exist, forming barriers and hindering a man from leading his true life, such as want of light, space, and beauty. The sun-rising is to a large number of town livers only an intimation--and rarely an agreeable one--that they must get out of bed. It is but the lighting of a lamp, and not, as Blake said, the rising of an innumerable company of the heavenly host consecrating the day to duty by crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.’ And even if there is the space to see the sky, there is still the absence of leisure to watch its unhurried changes. We all haste and rush, we hurry and drive. The very parlance of the day adopts new words to express dispatch, and one dear old body whom I know, who is sixty years old and of appropriate proportions, constantly informs me that she ‘flew’ hither and thither--a method of locomotion which, in earlier years, I remember, she reserved strictly for future and more heavenly purposes.