nd intelligence, England's _three
millions_ of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.[12]

[12] These suggestions are not offered in a hostile spirit. The
writer fully realizes the large amount of moral sentiment
and fervent piety assembled in the Church to uplift society
in this country, but he deeply regrets that it is not more
enlightened in ethics and in doctrine, and that the Church
has never got rid of its ancient taint, mentioned by the
Apostle James, that the brethren paid more respect to the
man with a gold ring than a man in cheap clothing.

The upward progress of humanity is foreign to their thoughts, and the
grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the
mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that
ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished
scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone.
How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the
Rev. S. R. Calthrop, "If the governments of the world would spend on
scientific discovery a hundredth part of what they spend on killing men,
or rather in making preparation for killing men and then not doing it,
the secrets of the earth would be laid bare in a time inordinately
short." But this very warlike ambition is a matter of CRIMINAL
OSTENTATION, like that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt--the
desperate determination to shine and boast as the master power in the
field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation fostered by the
leading powers of Europe. Vanity, literally meaning emptiness, is the
antithesis of wisdom, and military vanity is a half-way station on the
road to insanity.

The profligacy of private ostentation extends in this country to public
life, as was scandalously displayed in the twenty million State House
job at Albany (which our arithmetic makes equivalent to twenty thousand
lives) and renders all governmental affairs needlessly expensive[13]
(except in that admirable republic Switzerland), nor is it arrested by
the solemnity of death, for a prodigal funeral and a hundred thousand
dollar tomb for an individual eminent only by wealth is but a
fashionable matter of course to-day. Against this my moral sense
revolts. Had I the wealth of Croesus, or the power of Napoleon, I could
not consent to the evil record that my last act in life, in ordering a