Capitalists holding kings and presidents in check while playing the better game of civilization, equalizing indirectly by legislative philanthropies the extremes--every man's needs being taken as drafts drawn by Providence on opulence, to be honored at sight: "Stewards of the gods alone Are we; have nothing of our own Save what to us the gods commit, And take away when they see fit." Once all crimes were capital and punished with death. Now this Draconian code has been so meliorated and softened by the diffusion of mercy and humanity as to take life for life only; is pleading powerfully for the abolition of the death-penalty altogether. The sects are losing their monopoly in the heavenly luminary, closing no longer their brazen cope of darkening doctrines on the religious horizon to vitiate the social and political morals of mankind. The faiths of the cultivated nations are being revised, Christendom itself drifting with irresistible speed and momentum into a world-religion, commensurate with the advancing thought of advancing minds everywhere. As the Greeks received their Gods from Egypt and Phoenicia, Rome hers from Greece, and we ours from Rome, Judea and Britain, by the law of interfusion we are ripening into a cosmopolitan faith, with its Pantheon for all races. II.--METHOD. Ours were a trivial time if busied in building solely from the senses in facts of understanding, having nothing ideal to enshrine. Without symbols, peoples perish. Things must be exalted into some fair image of mind, the senses and gifts magnetized to body forth thoughts; the eye beholding these in what the hands fashion. Ideas supplement and symbolize facts: the field of realities lying behind unseen; the paddock of the common sense being but an enclosure within the immeasurable spaces of which thought is royal ranger,--owner of domains far larger and richer than these confine or survey, ideal estates which only mind can claim; quarries out of which nature itself is hewn, eye and hand are shapen. Head and hand should go abreast with thought. If the age of iron and bronze has been welding chains and fetters about the forehead and limbs, here, too, is the Promethean thought, using the new agencies let loose by the Dædalus of mechanic invention in the service of soul as of the senses. Having recovered the omnipotence in nature, the omnipresence, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land by living wires, stolen the chemistry of the solar ray, made light our painter, the lightning our runner, discovered the polar axis, set matter on fire, thought is pushing its inquiries into the hitherto unexplored regions of man's personality, for whose survey and service every modern instrumentality lends the outfit and means--facilities ample, unprecedented--new instruments for the new discoveries--new eyes for the new spectacles. Using no longer contentedly the fumbling fingers of the