s
in New York, as well as in the islands of the sea. Savages, not in
gloomy forests, but under the strength of gas-light, and the eyes of
policemen; with war-whoops and clubs very much the same, and garments as
fantastic, and souls as brutal, as any of their kindred at the
antipodes. China, India, Africa, will you not find their features in
some circles of the social world right around you? Idolatry! you cannot
find any more gross, any more cruel, on the broad earth, than within the
area of a mile around this pulpit. Dark minds from which God is
obscured; deluded souls, whose fetish is the dice-box or the bottle;
apathetic spirits, steeped in sensual abomination, unmoved by a moral
ripple, soaking in the slump of animal vitality. False gods, more
hideous, more awful, than Moloch or Baal; worshipped with shrieks,
worshipped with curses, with the hearth-stone for the bloody altar, and
the drunken husband for the immolating priest, and women and children
for the victims. I have no terms of respect too high for the brave and
conscientious men who carry the gospel, and their own lives, in their
hands to distant shores. But, surely, they need not go thus far to
_seek_ for the benighted and the debased. They may find there a wider
extent of heathenism, but none more intense than that which prevails
close by the school and the church. The richest products of modern
progress and Christian culture grow on the verge of barren wastes, and
jungles of violence, and "the region of the shadow of death."

In the street, however, not only do we behold these different degrees of
civilization, but those problems of diversity, which the highest form of
existing civilization developes--the diversities of extreme poverty, and
extreme wealth, for instance. Here sits the beggar, sick and pinched
with cold; and there goes a man of no better flesh and blood, and no
more authentic charter of soul, wrapped in comfort, and actually bloated
with luxury. There issues the whine of distress, beside the glittering
carriage-wheels. There, amidst the rush of gaiety; the busy, selfish
whirl; half naked, shivering, with her bare feet on the icy pavement,
stands the little girl, with the shadow of an experience upon her that
has made her preternaturally old, and it may be, driven the angel from
her face. Still, we cannot believe that above that wintry heaven which
stretches over her, there is less regard for the poor, neglected child,
than for that rosy belt