ers
all day long. The weak have to compete on equal terms with the strong;
and crave, in consequence, for artificial strength. How we shall stop
that I know not, while every man is "making haste to be rich, and
piercing himself through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish and
hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition." How we
shall stop that, I say, I know not. The old prophet may have been right
when he said, "Surely it is not of the Lord that the people shall labour
in the very fire, and weary themselves for very vanity;" and in some
juster, wiser, more sober system of society--somewhat more like the
Kingdom of The Father come on earth--it may be that poor human beings
will not need to toil so hard, and to keep themselves up to their work by
stimulants, but will have time to sit down, and look around them, and
think of God, and of God's quiet universe, with something of quiet in
themselves; something of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind,
as well as of body.

But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when--as it was
once well put--"every one has stopped running about like rats:"--that
those who work hard, whether with muscle or with brain, would not be
surrounded, as now, with every circumstance which tempts toward drink; by
every circumstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them an
easy prey to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad
water, bad smells, bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the
chest, disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from the
country--in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men, more or
less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or through whole
districts of the "black countries" of England: and then ask himself--Is
it the will of God that His human children should live and toil in such
dens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth? Let him ask
himself--Can they live and toil there without contracting a probably
diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary,
sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to
escape from its own stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by
rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces,
collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--and
that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the main
thing which the well-paid and