are brought into service within their narrow limits, and your energies and substance consumed in the work of enlarging their influence, while the more fruitful material for your charities lies neglected in the evils and miseries of your society. The Earth is your dominion. Tread firmly upon it. Remember it has been put into your keeping, and that your people are entirely responsible for its social condition. He who assists to improve that, serves the Deity better than he who spends his life in genuflections and prayers. When you look around among the wretched criminals among you, punished and unpunished, and the poverty-stricken, and the sad-eyed, neglected children; see the unsuppressed temptations to evil, the unrecognized virtue, and the uneven opportunities for individual advancement, you should bear in mind that all these are but evidences of the violation of the trust imposed in you by the divine intelligence. There is, perhaps, no spectacle upon the Earth that inspires more pity among the inhabitants of Mars, than the constant waste of your best parts in submitting yourselves to the impositions of your seers, who lead you away from your duties, under the theory that the Earth is merely a battle ground and field of conquest for the perpetuation of their doctrines, all else upon it being blank vanities. They have kept you away from the true business of your lives, and have mesmerized you, alternately terrifying and delighting you by unreal fancies; now exhibiting to you a paradise and at another time a nightmare. They have involved you in a perpetual shadow, discouraging you of all hopes of brightness until your celestial birth. By exhibiting only your grosser parts, and threatening the vengeance of an austere and capricious god of their own imaginary creation, they both degrade you and belittle your conceptions of the Deity. You could bend your faces upward with a better sincerity, if, instead of following phantoms all these ages, with your feet in the air, you could show a truer interpretation of the divine purpose in establishing a happier and more perfect dwelling together. CHAPTER XIV. I reside within a city of Mars which, in point of population and grandeur, is one of the first on our planet. In accordance with our custom of designating such places with names of quality, it would be known in your language as the city of Good Will. As it is the type of all others, you are already informed of a few of its general features. I will, however, give you some fuller description of our society and surroundings, in only the hasty and imperfect manner which this opportunity affords. With much the same feelings and inclinations as yours, and with that love and cultivation of the beautiful which we have pursued as an element of our religion, uninterrupted as with you by those delusions which destroy art, we have advanced much beyond you in that direction.