The result is, then, that he hits upon a reflection, which is, I do not say profound, but at the bottom of all profundity, so far as we have plumbed it. This reflection is to be found in the sap, fibre, and fruit of all morality, all law, philosophy, and religion. There is nothing like it to move the hearts of men; the heart it _cannot_ move belongs to an atheist (which creature, and not the ape, as some have supposed, is the link between brutes and men), the heart which it _has not_ moved, to one quite unawakened. For instance, those who fill the gaols; the society of thieves; the scum of the population, as it is termed, fermenting in alleys and poisoning the state. We have reformatories for the young of this breed, whom we endeavour to reclaim by reading, writing, and arithmetic--attendance at chapel, and book-keeping by double entry. But when you have put the young reprobate through all these exercises, you have only succeeded in making gravel walks in a wilderness; and though from those trim avenues you may scatter good seed enough, it perishes on the soil, or withers in a tangle of weeds. After all our labour and seed-scattering, we still complain that it is so hard to reach the heart. Now here we have the best means of touching it, perhaps. Let there be found some Professor of Time and Eternity, skilled to show how the world goes--and _is going_: who should exhibit, as in a wizard’s glass, the unending procession of human life. The Roman in his pride, a hundred million Romans in their pride--all perished; millions of elegant Greeks, with their elegant wives and mistresses, all perished; Attila’s thundering hosts riding off the scene--vanished: the clatter of their spears, the fury of their eyes, the tossing of their shaggy hair, the cloud of thoughts that moved upon their faces--they and all that belonged to them. Not that these personages make the most affecting groups in the series of dissolving views which illustrate the history of the world. I would rather confine myself to Holborn Hill, were I professor, in a penitentiary, of Time and Eternity; and between the period when it lay solitary in the moonlight, clothed with grass, crowned with trees, bitterns booming by the river below, while some wild mother lay under the branches singing to her baby in a tongue dead as herself now--from that time to the present there has been a very pretty striking of tents and wandering away. Quite enough for any professor’s purpose. Quite enough, if impressed upon an ignorant vicious heart, to prepare it for a better--certainly for a more responsible life. Your young reprobate will never perceive his relations to his Creator, till he has discovered the relations of mankind to creation, and his own place among mankind. You desire him to contemplate the Future: he cannot do it till he is shown the Past.