We are solemnly assured that the world is steadily growing better; and I suppose that's so, for in days of old they crucified men head downwards for telling the truth, while now they only hammer them over the head with six-shooters and drag 'em around a Baptist college campus with a rope. All that a reformer now needs is a hard head and a rubber neck. The cheerful idiot, alias the optimist, is forever prating of the world's progress. Progress is a desirable thing only when we make it in the right direction. It may be sure and swift down a soaped plank into wild ocean depths; or it may be with painful steps and slow toward the eternal mountain tops where breaks the great white light of God, and there's no more of darkness and of death. Progress industrial, the productive power of labor multiplied by two, by ten; and with such improved weapons for waging war upon the grisly gorgon of want, nearly nine millions of the industrial army in India alone died upon their shields. Hosannahs mounting in costly churches here, the starving babe tugging at the empty breast of the dead mother there!-- and we send to the famine-sufferers many bibles and hymn- books, little bacon and beans. Bibles and hymn-books are excellent things in their ways, but do not possess an absorbing interest for the man with an aching void concealed about his system. Starving people ask a Christian world for grub, and it gives them forty'leven different brands of saving grace--each warranted the only genuine --most of these elixirs of life ladled out by hired missionaries who serve God for the long green, and who are often so deplorably ignorant that they couldn't tell a religious thesis from an ichthyosaurian. Progress in religion until there's no longer a divine message from on high, no God in Israel; only a fashionable pulpiteering to minister to languid minds, the cultivation of foolish fads and the flaunting of fine feathers-- the church becoming a mere Vanity Fair or social clearing- house, a kind of esthetic forecourt to hades instead of the gate to heaven. At the opposite extreme we find blatant blackguardism by so-called evangelists, who were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma, yet who set up as instructors of the masses in the profound mysteries of the Almighty. Men who would get shipwrecked in the poetry of Shakespeare, or lost in the philosophy of one of his fools, pretend to interpret the plans of Him who writes his thoughts in flaming words on the papyri of immensity, whose sentences are astral fire.