It would sound a little strange to some people, if we should find that the judges of a court had received forty or fifty thousand dollars from men who were plaintiffs in that Court. You and I would remember that a gift blindeth the eyes of the prudent, how much more of the profligate! But it would be "honorable" in the plaintiffs to give it; "honorable" in the judges to take it! Hitherto I have called your attention to the proofs of the preponderance of money. I will now point you to signs, which are not exactly proofs, of this immediate worship of money. See these signs in Boston. When the Old South Church was built, when Christ's Church in Salem Street, when King's Chapel, when Brattle Square Church, they were respectively the costliest buildings in town. They were symbols of religion, as churches always are; symbols of the popular esteem for religion. Out of the poverty of the people, great sums of money were given for these "Houses of God." They said, like David of old, It is a shame that we dwell in a palace of cedars, and the Ark of the Most High remains under the curtains of a tent. How is it now? A crockery shop overlooks the roof-tree of the church where once the eloquence of a Channing enchanted to heaven the worldly hearts of worldly men. Now a hotel looks down on the church which was once all radiant with the sweet piety of a Buckminster. A haberdasher's warehouse overtops the church of the Blessed Trinity; the roof of the shop is almost as tall as the very tower of the church. These things are only symbols. Let us compare Boston, in this respect, with any European city that you can name; let us compare it with gay and frivolous Vienna, the gayest and most frivolous city of all Europe, not setting Paris aside. For though the surface of life in Paris sparkles and glitters all over with radiant and iridescent and dazzling bubbles, empty and ephemeral, yet underneath there flows a stream which comes from the great fountain of nature, and tends on to the ocean of human welfare. No city is more full of deep thought and earnest life. But in Vienna it is not so. Yet even there, above the magnificence of the Herrengasse, above the proud mansions of the Esterhazys and the Schwartzenbergs and the Lichtensteins, above the costly elegance of the imperial palace, St. Stephen's Church lifts its tall spire, and points to God all day long and all the night, a still and silent emblem of a power higher than any mandate of the Kings of earth; ay, to the Infinite God. Men look up to its cross overtowering the frivolous city, and take a lesson! Here, Trade looks down to find the church.