t; and ask you, if there is not some
void that no earthly good can fill--that no finite thing can sustain and
satisfy? Can you go on with the common business of the world, discharge
all its obligations, control yourself in its excitements, resist its
evil solicitations, bear up under its trials, and, finally, reach that
period in life when you must ask--"What is all this worth?--these years
of toil, these eager enterprises, this golden accumulation or
unfortunate failure--what are they all worth, and what do they
mean?"--can anybody well get along with all this, without Religion? My
friends, I say to you that, not consciously, perhaps, like the old
saints who wrought and prayed and walked with upward-looking faces--but
really, in the deep yearning and the secret gravitation of the soul--you
_do_ confess that here we have no continuing city, and you are seeking
one to come. At least, it seems to me that without the Help of Religion,
there is only the alternative of moral indifference--a cold, hard
worldliness, or of recklessness and spiritual despair. And is not this
the alternative which is exhibited in the midst of all our
civilization--in the midst of this gorgeous materialism of the
nineteenth century? Thousands, it is to be apprehended, do exhibit one
or the other of those extremes which the poet has so well described:

"For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their minds to some unmeaning task-work give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall;
And so, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near.
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast,
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

"And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison, and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor does he know how there prevail
Despotic on life's sea,
Trade-winds that cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind, and blackening waves,
And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning