underwood. I can imagine--nay, have we not seen that, too?--
and can we not see it any day in the street?--human souls so
dazzled and stupefied, instead of being quickened, by the numberless
objects of skill and beauty, which they see in their walks through
the streets, that they care no more for the wonders of man's making,
than the savage does for the wonders of God's making, which he sees
around him in every insect, bird, and flower. The man who walks the
streets every day, is the very man who will see least in the
streets. The man who works in a factory, repeating a thousand times
a day some one dull mechanical operation, or even casting up day
after day the accounts of it, is the man who will think least of the
real wonderfulness of that factory; of the amount of prudence,
skill, and science, which it expresses; of its real value to himself
and to his class; of its usefulness to far nations beyond the seas.
He is like a savage who looks up at some glorious tree, capable, in
the hands of civilized man, of a hundred uses, and teeming to him
with a hundred scientific facts; and thinks all the while of nothing
but his chance of finding a few grubs beneath its bark.

Think over, I beseech you, this fact of the stupefying effect of
mere material civilization; and remember that plenty and comfort do
not diminish but increase that stupefaction; that Hebrew prophets
knew it, and have told us, again and again, that, by fulness of
bread the heart waxeth gross; that Greek sages knew it, and have
told us, again and again, that need, and not satiety, was the
quickener of the human intellect. Believe that man requires another
bread than the bread of the body; that sometimes the want of the
bodily bread will awaken the hunger for that bread of the soul.
Bear in mind that the period during which the middle and lower
classes of England were most brutalized, was that of their greatest
material prosperity, the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Remember that with the distress which came upon them, at the end of
the French war, their spiritual hunger awakened--often in forms
diseased enough: but growing healthier, as well as keener, year by
year; and that if they are not brutalized once more by their present
unexampled prosperity, it will be mainly owing to the spiritual life
which was awakened in those sad and terrible years. Remember that
the present carelessness of the masses about either religious or
political agitation