Now, I am in favor of material progress. I am not one of those who think that the simplicity of savagery is better than the artificiality of civilization. No, I say, let us be as civilized as possible. Let us make all the progress we can. Let us go endlessly on in finding out God’s great universe, and so realizing that mastery once divinely bestowed on man over the powers and capacities of nature. Let us do all this with heart and hope, but let us at the same time recognize the fact that never so shall we obtain immortality, never so obtain exemption from ill. Our world will still be a world of human infirmity and human suffering, however much the physical framework of things is put by science under our control. In truth, it may well be doubted whether of real comfort, the sum is greater to men now, over and above all deduction, than it was a century or centuries ago. The appliances and means of comfort are more now, perhaps a hundred fold. But so too are the needs that must be met. And the difference of real comfort in favor of these times would not be found great. I repeat that I am not a reactionist. I want no retrograde movement, but, on the contrary, only advance, and ever advance. Still, whatever the advance, there will be, proceeding from that advance, no corresponding advance in solid human comfort and happiness. The reason is that human comfort and happiness depend in the main on conditions that science can not supply. They depend on the state of the mind within. They depend on the habitual or prevalent course of thought and feeling in the soul. What we chiefly need is not easier and more comfortable subsistence—though this too is good and desirable—but a released and victorious mind. We shall never escape our physical conditions, and these will always be more or less unsatisfactory. We shall rub against the bars, we shall press against the pricks of our material environment and suffer. This is inevitable. But there is for us something better than escape from physical limitation would be, were such escape possible. We can live a life of the mind that shall be, to a great degree, independent of the life of the body, and ascendent over it. Even let our hands be filled with mean and sordid tasks, we may, as Mrs. Browning puts it in her verse, keep our souls “singing at a work apart.” The mind is its own place—and its own environment. In this fact lies our hope. And here is the great chance of literature.