iety every season. This is not quite counted by seasons,
therefore the Newspapers are silent: but by generations and centuries, I
assure you it becomes amazingly sensible; and surpasses, as Heaven does
Earth, all the corn and wine, and whale-oil and California bullion, or
any other crop you grow. If that crop cease, the other crops--please to
take them also, if you are anxious about them. That once ceasing, we may
shut shop; for no other crop whatever will stay with us, nor is worth
having if it would.

To promote men of talent, to search and sift the whole society in every
class for men of talent, and joyfully promote them, has not always been
found impossible. In many forms of polity they have done it, and still
do it, to a certain degree. The degree to which they succeed in doing it
marks, as I have said, with very great accuracy the degree of divine
and human worth that is in them, the degree of success or real ultimate
victory they can expect to have in this world.--Think, for example,
of the old Catholic Church, in its merely terrestrial relations to the
State; and see if your reflections, and contrasts with what now is, are
of an exulting character. Progress of the species has gone on as with
seven-league boots, and in various directions has shot ahead amazingly,
with three cheers from all the world; but in this direction, the most
vital and indispensable, it has lagged terribly, and has even
moved backward, till now it is quite gone out of sight in clouds of
cotton-fuzz and railway-scrip, and has fallen fairly over the horizon to
rearward!

In those most benighted Feudal societies, full of mere tyrannous steel
Barons, and totally destitute of Tenpound Franchises and Ballot-boxes,
there did nevertheless authentically preach itself everywhere this
grandest of gospels, without which no other gospel can avail us much,
to all souls of men, "Awake ye noble souls; here is a noble career for
you!" I say, everywhere a road towards promotion, for human nobleness,
lay wide open to all men. The pious soul,--which, if you reflect,
will mean the ingenuous and ingenious, the gifted, intelligent and
nobly-aspiring soul,--such a soul, in whatever rank of life it were
born, had one path inviting it; a generous career, whereon, by human
worth and valor, all earthly heights and Heaven itself were attainable.
In the lowest stratum of social thraldom, nowhere was the noble soul
doomed quite to choke, and die ignobly. The Church, poo