2. Again, we should notice that development in one direction may be at the cost of development in another. The struggle for any lower form of existence than that already attained, is inevitably at the cost of the higher. The degrading effects of destitution are proverbial. Craft, cruelty, selfishness, and all the vices needed for success in a gladiatorial contest are often the fruits of such competition. Also, commercial progress seems on the whole to be at the expense of progress in art and the higher tastes, sacrificing everything to the production of the greatest possible quantity of material comforts. If it sharpens the wits and sensibilities in some directions, it blunts them in others. Now, the first sense suggested to us in these days by the word "progress," is material progress--all that came in with steam; and this narrow conception vitiates much of our reasoning. It is in this realm undoubtedly that competition is such a factor of rapid advance; but we forget that the food of what the best men have ever considered the best life, is not limited or divisible; but like the light and air is undiminished how many soever share it. Whatever advance there has been in the life of the mind and of the higher tastes and sensibilities, cannot directly be explained by competition, but simply by the quiet upward working of Nature's inherent forces. We look with scorn at the unprogressive East, satisfied that there can be no progress, no life worth living, where there is no rush for dollars. But I think we have yet to learn the meaning of _ex Oriente lux_. Much of our immorality and our social evil comes from the fact that those who have developed the faculties of a higher grade of life, seek the lower as an end in itself, and not simply so far as it is a condition of the higher and no further. The Gospel precept, as usual, enunciates only the law of reason and nature, when it bids us to "Seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice," that is, to put our best life in the front, and to make it the measure and limit of any other quest. The neglect of this principle gives us high living and plain thinking, instead of "high thinking and plain living;" and takes the bread out of the mouths of the poor. The competition for pleasures and luxuries and amusements, may indeed develop certain industries and cause progress in certain narrow lines, but it is at the cost of the only progress worth the name.