Robert Elsmere stands in the dawn of philosophy. There is hardly light enough for him to see clearly; but there is so much light that the stars in the night of superstition are obscured. _Question_. You do not deny that a religious belief is a comfort? _Answer_. There is one thing that it is impossible for me to comprehend. Why should any one, when convinced that Christianity is a superstition, have or feel a sense of loss? Certainly a man acquainted with England, with London, having at the same time something like a heart, must feel overwhelmed by the failure of what is known as Christianity. Hundreds of thousands exist there without decent food, dwelling in tenements, clothed with rags, familiar with every form of vulgar vice, where the honest poor eat the crust that the vicious throw away. When this man of intelligence, of heart, visits the courts; when he finds human liberty a thing treated as of no value, and when he hears the judge sentencing girls and boys to the penitentiary--knowing that a stain is being put upon them that all the tears of all the coming years can never wash away--knowing, too, and feeling that this is done without the slightest regret, without the slightest sympathy, as a mere matter of form, and that the judge puts this brand of infamy upon the forehead of the convict just as cheerfully as a Mexican brands his cattle; and when this man of intelligence and heart knows that these poor people are simply the victims of society, the unfortunates who stumble and over whose bodies rolls the Juggernaut--he knows that there is, or at least appears to be, no power above or below working for righteousness--that from the heavens is stretched no protecting hand. And when a man of intelligence and heart in England visits the workhouse, the last resting place of honest labor; when he thinks that the young man, without any great intelligence, but with a good constitution, starts in the morning of his life for the workhouse, and that it is impossible for the laboring man, one who simply has his muscle, to save anything; that health is not able to lay anything by for the days of disease--when the man of intelligence and heart sees all this, he is compelled to say that the civilization of to-day, the religion of to-day, the charity of to-day--no matter how much of good there may be behind them or in them, are failures.