Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated, liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the past, and in danger, from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing into egotism. Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the degradation and infamy of slavery. Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the cradle of a nation. Either we must admit the idea of a God,--of the moral law, which is an emanation from him,--and the idea of human duty, freely accepted by mankind, as the practical consequence of that law,--or we must admit the idea of a ruling force of things, and its practical consequence, the worship of individual force or success, the omnipotence of _fact_. From this dilemma there is no escape. Either we must accept the sovereignty of an _aim_ prescribed by conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the _nationality_ of a given people among the many of which humanity is composed,--an aim recognized by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore _religious_; or we must accept the sovereignty of the _right_, arbitrarily defined, of each nation, and its practical consequences,--the pursuit by each individual of his own interest and his own _well-being_, the satisfaction of his own desires,--and the impossibility of any sovereign _duty_, to which all the citizens, from those who govern down to the humblest of the governed, owe obedience and sacrifice.