And we have too many sleek Reynards prowling 'round the sheep-pens and dove-cotes of this people, too few faithful Gelerts doing stubborn battle with predaceous beasts. There's one class of people whom we cannot brand as arrant knaves and put in the pillory, yet who are a curse to any country. These are your Laodiceans in religion and politics, your luke-warms, your namby-pamby milk- and-cider set who are neither cold or hot. These are your eminently proper people, your stereotyped respectables. They accept the Gospel as true, not that they can comprehend it, but rather because they lack sufficient mental vigor to deny it. They join the church and align themselves with that political party to which the local nabobs belong. "What will people say?" is to them the all- important problem. They have followed some old bell weather or lead-gander into the wire-grass pasture of Respectabilia. They observe all the proprieties--at least in outward appearance. These are the animals whose vis inertia perpetuates all the abuses of wealth and power-- whatsoever has the approval of two or more generations of infamous rascals is so eminently respectable. These are the people who are so profoundly shocked by the alleged slang of Hugo and vulgarities of Goethe, while compelling their daughters to read the Canticles. They have a conniption fit and fall in it because some shapely danseuse kicks up her rhythmic heels on the vaudeville stage, then organize Trilbys auctions, kissing bees and garter raffles for the glory of God. Their ideal is expediency and their moral law the Eleventh Commandment-- Don't get caught. These are the people who stone the prophets of progress. They are to the social organism what a pound of putty would be to the stomach of a dyspeptic. They are a mill-stone slung about the neck of the giant of civilization. "What will people say?" Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have absorbed it--it will have become respectable--and you couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus' Auticyrian hellebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison him!" because he denied the old falsehood that the world is flat; of Servetus, "Burn him!" because he dissented from the ipse dixit of another heretic; of Socrates, "Poison him!" because he laughed at the too amorous gods of Greece; of Robert Emmett, "Hang him!" because he wasn't a Cleveland-Bayard Anglomaniac; and they said of Jesus Christ, "Crucify him!" because he intimated the fashionable preachers of his time were a set of splenetic-hearted hypocrites. That's what people say; but occasionally there's one to answer that 'tis not in the power of all Xerxes' hosts to bend one thought of his proud heart--"they may destroy the case of Anaxarchus, himself they cannot reach." It is not what foolish sound