I am accustomed punctually to discharge my obligations in what may be called celestial directions, holding it to be every man’s duty not to put a millstone round a weaker vessel’s neck by omitting to set a good example. Also, in the best sense of the word, I am a religious man. Did not Bismarck say, and has not the saying become part and parcel of the marrow of the nation, “We Germans fear God and nothing else in the world”? In exactly, I should say, the same way and degree as Bismarck was, am I religious. At Storchwerder, where I am known, I go to church every alternate Sunday and allow myself to be advised and cautioned by the pastor, willing to admit it is his turn to speak and recognizing that he is paid to do so, but reserving to myself the right to put him and keep him in his proper place during the fourteen secular days that divide these pious oases. Before our daily dinner also I say grace, a rare thing in households where there are no children to look on; and if I do not, as a few of the stricter households do, conduct family prayers every day, it is because I do not like them. There is, after all, a limit at which duty must retire before a man’s personal tastes. We are not solely machines for discharging obligations. I see perfectly clearly that it is most good and essential that one’s cook and wife should pray together, and even one’s orderly, but I do not see that they require the assistance and countenance of the gentleman of the house while they do it. I am religious in the best and highest sense of the word, a sense that soars far above family prayers, a sense in no way to be explained, any more than other high things are explainable. The higher you get in the regions of thought the more dumb you become. Also the more quiescent. Doing, as all persons of intellect know, is a very inferior business to thinking, and much more likely to make one hot. But these cool excursions of the intellect are not to be talked about to women and the lower classes. What would happen if they too decided to prefer quiescence? For them creeds and churches are positive necessities, and the plainer and more definite they are the better. The devout poor, the devout mothers of families, how essential they are to the freedom and comfort of the rest. The less you have the more it is necessary that you should be contented, and nothing does this so thoroughly as the doctrine of resignation. It would indeed be an unthinkable calamity if all the uneducated and the feeble-minded, the lower classes and the women, should lose their piety enough to want things. Women, it is true, are fairly safe so long as they have a child once a year, which is Nature’s way of keeping them quiet; but it fills me with nothing short of horror when I hear of any discontent among the male portion of the proletariat.