You cannot fail to have observed, as one of the most promising signs of your destiny, that wherever humanity in the midst of civilization is freest from the cares of sustenance supply, it inclines to devote its leisure to a cultivation of the mind. The crudeness and vulgarity of some, and the refinement of others, are entirely due to difference in opportunities of development, and between these two there must always exist a great repulsion. What good can you therefore expect of mankind as a whole, so long as by your methods a few only are vouchsafed the opportunities for knowledge? The forces at work within your society have now, we we will say, brought up your population and general conditions to the standard of those which may be found in the older portions of the Earth. Your poverty is more intense and widespread, with its corresponding increase in crime, while your wealth has become more munificent and ostentatious. Impelled by the necessities of life and a brave emulation, all your industries will be found in the highest strain of action. The accumulated products of labor and its multiplied activity have given to you a semblance of prosperity and success. But while in the course of your progress you have created new necessities and wants, you have made no just provision by which they could be, as near as possible, equally shared; and as a consequence the apparent as well as the silent and concealed miseries of human life were never greater. There is to be observed now a marked increase in the spread and influence of your religion. As the hope of success in life becomes lessened, and as the heartaches and distresses increase by your uneven struggles, the suffering and disappointed masses turn naturally to another existence for what has been denied them in this; and it can be said of all your religious theories, that their contrivances to make you suffer uncomplainingly the outrages of authority are the best that could have been devised. The few among you enjoying the bounties of life, surrounded by that want and privation whose voices they cannot escape, and whose strong arms they cannot fail to observe, turn instinctively to your religious doctrines with a sense of safety and protection. The few favored ones, looking over the vast multitude of their less fortunate brothers, are conscious that the superabundance they enjoy has been doubtfully acquired, and they are quick to embrace that convenient justification, which ascribes the greater ills and burdens of the many to a preconceived and unalterable arrangement of the divine will. CHAPTER IX.