ire a frightful and not less
monstrous power when they are in a state of moral insanity, and break
loose from their social and religious obligations. Remember too how
rapidly the plague of diseased opinions is communicated, and that if it
once gain head, it is as difficult to be stopped as a conflagration or a
flood. The prevailing opinions of this age go to the destruction of
everything which has hitherto been held sacred. They tend to arm the
poor against the rich; the many against the few: worse than this, for it
will also be a war of hope and enterprise against timidity, of youth
against age.

_Montesinos_.--Sir Ghost, you are almost as dreadful an alarmist as our
Cumberland cow, who is believed to have lately uttered this prophecy,
delivering it with oracular propriety in verse:

"Two winters, a wet spring,
A bloody summer, and no king."

_Sir Thomas More_.--That prophecy speaks the wishes of the man, whoever
he may have been, by whom it was invented: and you who talk of the
progress of knowledge, and the improvement of society, and upon that
improvement build your hope of its progressive melioration, you know that
even so gross and palpable an imposture as this is swallowed by many of
the vulgar, and contributes in its sphere to the mischief which it was
designed to promote. I admit that such an improved condition of society
as you contemplate is possible, and hath ought always to be kept in view:
but the error of supposing it too near, of fancying that there is a short
road to it, is, of all the errors of these times, the most pernicious,
because it seduces the young and generous, and betrays them imperceptibly
into an alliance with whatever is flagitious and detestable. The fact is
undeniable that the worst principles in religion, in morals, and in
politics, are at this time more prevalent than they ever were known to be
in any former age. You need not be told in what manner revolutions in
opinion bring about the fate of empires; and upon this ground you ought
to regard the state of the world, both at home and abroad, with fear,
rather than with hope.

_Montesinos_.--When I have followed such speculations as may allowably be
indulged, respecting what is hidden in the darkness of time and of
eternity, I have sometimes thought that the moral and physical order of
the world may be so appointed as to coincide; and that the revolutions of
this planet may correspond with the condition of its inhabitant