In religion, no man pretends to say that a class of men can perform the duty which each man owes to God, and the person who should say such a thing would be considered in jest or partially deranged. Yet it is so tacitly held, and practically believed. As the man sits in his cushioned seat on the Lord's day, and looks up at the stately edifice which he has helped to build, and hears the eloquent words of the preacher whom he in part pays, he has a comfortable feeling that his work is done. To be sure, no man can love God without knowing Him, and none can know Him well without a careful and intelligent study of His works in creation and revelation; but the man himself has no time for this, he has something else to do, and if he but hire another to dig out these truths, and present them to him, as it were ready made, of a Sunday, he considers that it is enough. The preacher performs the thinking and the architect the acting of man's duty to God. So the world goes on; religion is merely logical, mechanical, a kind of 'greatest amount of happiness' affair, a lubricant to make the wheels of society move on smoothly, instead of being from the soul, dynamical, giving love and life to the world. This mechanical tendency has also an element which makes it worse than any corresponding state in former times, for these at least contained a faith which was positive, while ours is utterly negative; theirs sprang from want of mental power, ours from want of time. When in times past a people felt the power of thought going from them, and became conscious of their inability to solve the great riddle of life which was perplexing them, they chose the best remedy for what was irremediable, and turned to wiser men than they for direction and help. From thence sprang faith, reverence, hero worship, which stands next in rank to independent thought. But we, having no time to attend to these things, have yet no faith in those to whom they are entrusted, and no hope of their successful issue; we but shrug our shoulders at the thought, say, 'I cannot attend to it,' and let it go. So _laisser aller_ is the cry of the age, a dead negation of thought and volition. By proving the existence of the causes that produce it, we have shown the presence of a mechanical tendency in our social state; the same thing may be done in another way, by proving the existence of effects that flow from it. The truest index of a people's condition is found in the meaning which they attach to certain, words. A history of the word _virtus_, manhood, is a history of the social condition of the Roman people. If, then, we find that the conceptions which we attach to such words as God, man, and society are mechanical, then society must have such a tendency, for these words lie at the foundation of all government, all social movements, and all individual actions.