ue, the likeness
of Almighty God. This, indeed, the Hebrew Prophets, who knew no science
in one sense of the word, do not expressly say: but it is a corollary
from their doctrine, which we may discover for ourselves, if we will look
at the nations round us now, if we will look at all the nations which
have been. Even Voltaire himself acknowledged that; and when he pointed
to the Chinese as the most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed their
prosperity uniformly to their virtue. We now know that he was wrong in
fact: for we have discovered that Chinese civilization is one not of
peace and plenty, but of anarchy and wretchedness. But that fact only
goes to corroborate the belief, which (strange juxtaposition!) was common
to Voltaire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom he scoffed, namely, that
virtue is wealth, and vice is ruin. For we have found that these
Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least, are an especially
unrighteous people; rotting upon the rotting remnants of the wisdom and
virtue of their forefathers, which now live only on their lips in flowery
maxims about justice and mercy and truth, as a cloak for practical
hypocrisy and villany; and we have discovered also, as a patent fact,
just what the Hebrew Prophets would have foretold us--that the miseries
and horrors which are now destroying the Chinese Empire, are the direct
and organic results of the moral profligacy of its inhabitants.

I know no modern nation, moreover, which illustrates so forcibly as China
the great historic law which the Hebrew Prophets proclaim; and that is
this:--That as the prosperity of a nation is the correlative of their
morals, so are their morals the correlative of their theology. As a
people behaves, so it thrives; as it believes, so it behaves. Such as
his Gods are, such will the man be; down to that lowest point which too
many of the Chinese seem to have reached, where, having no Gods, he
himself becomes no man; but (as I hear you see him at the Australian
diggings) abhorred for his foul crimes even by the scum of Europe.

I do not say that the theology always produces the morals, any more than
that the morals always produce the theology. Each is, I think,
alternately cause and effect. Men make the Gods in their own likeness;
then they copy the likeness they have set up. But whichever be cause,
and whichever effect, the law, I believe, stands true, that on the two
together depends the physical welfare of a people.