For such an inconsequential whim as that men should be free to pray in any way they choose, the Pilgrim Fathers betook themselves to a wilderness peopled with savages, preferring to die by the tomahawk rather than submit to clerical authority. The free admission of immigrants is not half so rash an adventure, and the thing to be gained by it is a more obvious good than that of freedom of worship. Even a child can understand that it is better for human beings, be they Russians or Italians or Greeks, to get into a country where there is enough to eat and enough to wear, where nobody is permitted to abuse anybody else, and where story-books are given away, than it is to live in countries where starvation and cruel treatment is the lot of multitudes. No man worthy of the name will deny that moral paralysis is a worse evil than congestion of the labor market, and moral paralysis creeps on us whenever we throw down the burden of duty to recline in the lap of comfort. We shall see no prodigies in the ranks of our children as long as we are ruled by the calculating commercial spirit which takes nothing on faith, which spurns as impracticable whatever is not easily negotiable, and repudiates our debt to the past as something too fantastic for serious consideration. Before the present era of prosperity set in, a scoffer who would brand as superstition the ideas for which our forefathers died would not have spoken with the expectation of being applauded, as he does to-day. Worldly things, like comfort, position, security, and what is called success, have absorbed our attention to such a degree that some of us have forgotten that there is any good save the good of the flesh. Possessions have crowded out aspirations, the applause of the world has become more necessary than the inner satisfactions, and the whole horizon of life is filled with the glaring bulk of an overwhelming prosperity. No wonder a prophet like Edward Everett Hale was moved to pray before his assembled congregation, "Deliver us, O Lord! from our terrible prosperity." He saw what the worship of fleshly good did to our children: how it stripped from them the wings of higher ambition, and shackled their feet, that should be marching on to the conquest of spiritual worlds, with the weight of false successes. "Deliver us, O Lord! from our terrible prosperity," that our children may have burdens to lift, that they may learn to clutch at things afar, and their sight grow strong with gazing after visions. "Deliver us, O Lord! from our terrible prosperity," that simplicity of life may strip from us all sophistication, till we learn to honor the dreamers in our midst, and our prophets have a place in the councils of the nation. * * * * *