Something also may be done to promote religion amongst the poor, at least something to make it practicable for a poor man to come to church on Sunday, with his fellow-creatures who are not miserable--and to hear the best things that the ablest men in the church have to offer. We are very democratic in our State, not at all so in our church. In this matter the Catholics put us quite to shame. If, as some men still believe, it be a manly calling and a noble, to preach Christianity, then to preach it to men who stand in the worst and most dangerous positions in society; to take the highest truths of human consciousness, the loftiest philosophy, the noblest piety, and bring them down into the daily life of poor men, rude men, men obscure, unfriended, ready to perish; surely this is the noblest part of that calling, and demands the noblest gifts, the fairest and the largest culture, the loftiest powers. It is no hard thing to reason with reasoning men, and be intelligible to the intelligent; to talk acceptably and even movingly to scholars and men well read, is no hard thing if you are yourself well read and a scholar. But to be intelligible to the ignorant, to reason with men who reason not, to speak acceptably and movingly with such men, to inspire them with wisdom, with goodness and with piety, that is the task only for some men of rare genius who can stride over the great gulf betwixt the thrones of creative power, and the humble positions of men ignorant, poor and forgot! Yet such men there are, and here is their work. Something can be done for the children of the poor--to promote their education, to find them employment, to snatch these little ones from underneath the feet of that grim Poverty. It is not less than awful, to think while there are more children born in Boston of Catholic parents than of Protestant, that yet more than three fifths thereof die before the sun of their fifth year shines on their luckless heads. I thank God that thus they die. If there be not wisdom enough in society, nor enough of justice there to save them from their future long-protracted suffering, then I thank God that Death comes down betimes, and moistens his sickle while his crop is green. I pity not the miserable babes who fall early before that merciful arm of Death. They are at rest. Poverty cannot touch them. Let the mothers who bore them rejoice, but weep only for those that are left--left to ignorance, to misery, to intemperance, to vice that I shall not name; left to the mercies of the jail, and perhaps the gallows at the last. Yet Boston is a Christian city--and it is eighteen hundred years since one great Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost!