political achievement; picture to yourselves the
power not only of a mind, but of a personality, of a character
which can attract vast millions who have never gazed upon the human
expression in the human face--can attract them to great love or to
great hatred, can mold the destinies of an empire, can change the
current of the time--think of such men as Richelieu or Cavour, or more
modern instances, and you understand what is the greatness and the
power of the attraction of political activity. Or, to come nearer
home, go into your London city, and watch the working of your London
mart. What have you before you there? The activity of the hearts and
minds of Englishmen, sending out the force of the life that is in them
from the heart that is beating in those tremendous centers to the
distances that are only stopt by the most distant frontiers of the
world. Your sayings and thoughts are quoted throughout the markets of
Europe--yes, throughout the markets of other continents; your actions
and decisions make the difference between the decisions and the
actions of men that you have never seen, that you shall never see. The
Medici were a power in Florence, first as bankers, then as governors.
There are men in London who have power throughout the world, not only
in Florence, not as profest governors, but as practical governors
through the activity of commercial instinct. Certainly, it seems to me
quite possible that there may be minds carried away by such a great
activity; but that great activity I submit to your deeper, quieter
English Sunday thought--that activity will stimulate, will delight,
will attract, will intoxicate; one thing it will not do--I am bold to
say it will never satisfy.

And if I may take another instance for a moment, there is this pure
intellect, bidding good-by to the political arena, to the commercial
strife, saying farewell to the dreams of beauty, and falling back
upon the cells of the brain, traversing the corridors of thought, and
entering first here and there into that labyrinth of instinct, or
association, or accumulative learning. Certainly, there is a power of
a delight that the world can never realize outside the region of the
brain. If that needs proof you have only, dear friends, to meditate
upon such lives as Newton, or Shakespeare, or Kepler, or if you turn
to the region of meditative thought, to such lives as our own George
Eliot--yes, there is that in the mere exercise of intellect which