alluded, by holding fast those very principles by the strength of which our people have been enabled so happily in times past to resist monarchical aggressions. The vital source for the nourishment of those principles is a deep conviction of the Divine government of the world, and of the worth of every soul created by God. “If,” says De Tocqueville, “amongst the opinions of a democratic people any of those pernicious theories exist which inculcate that all perishes with the body, let the men by whom such theories are professed be marked as the natural foes of such a people. The Materialists are offensive to me in many respects; I am disgusted at their arrogance. If their system could be of any utility to man, it would seem to be by giving him a modest opinion of himself. But these reasoners show that it is not so; and when they think they have said enough to establish that they are brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated that they are gods.”[105] We have lately seen this arrogant materialism culminate in a temper of mind well expressed by one of the writers in the organ of the fashionable London Clubs, where, treating of that large class of persons of various shades of character who are brought under the Contagious Diseases Acts, he says these women ought to be “treated as foul sewers are treated, as physical facts and not as moral agents.” Sewers have neither souls nor civil rights; by admitting into their political theory the idea that any class of human beings whatever may be reduced to the level of an inanimate nuisance for political purposes, these writers have demonstrated to us very clearly the intimate connection between a gross materialism and the most cruel and oppressive despotism. The men who speak thus, and who act in harmony with their utterances, do not believe that the beings of whom they speak have souls; to them any regenerating influence from a Divine source upon the spirit of man or woman is inconceivable. It is needless to indicate more particularly the natural and close alliance between this materialism and the coercive and oppressive policy which such materialists, though frequently professing radicalism, will readily adopt, merely transferring the power of the deprivation of civil and human rights from the hands of a monarch or a hereditary aristocracy into those of official experts who will be the elect of a fully enfranchised people, and therefore more dangerously confided in by the people. In order that we may avoid such a future despotism having its root deeply laid in a materialistic creed, we need—and a merciful God will grant it—for each individual, and for the nation at large, a fuller measure of that light of the conscience, and that life of the spirit which will enable us to discern with clearness and to tread with perseverance that path which leads to the goal whither the hopes of the human race are ever tending. The following are the editions of some books consulted:—