become the home of God's free children.
Disease has been tracked to its secret hiding-places, and barriers have
been built against pestilence and contagion. War has become less
frequent and less barbarous; persecution for opinion and belief has
become rare; man's inhumanity to woman, which is the deepest stain upon
the history of the race, has yielded to the influence of religion and
knowledge; and with ever-increasing force the truth is borne in upon
those who think and observe, that the fate of the rich and high-placed
cannot be separated from that of the poor and lowly. While we earnestly
strive to control and repress every kind of moral evil, we feel that
society itself is responsible for sin and crime, and that social and
political conditions and constitutions must change, until the weak and
the heavy-laden are protected from the heartlessness of the strong and
fortunate. Not only must those who labor with their hands have larger
opportunities than hitherto have ever been given them, but in the whole
social life of man there must be more justice, more love, more
tenderness, more of the spirit of Christ, than hitherto has ever been
found there.

What marvelous, intellectual work are we not doing? What admirable
expression of the highest truth do we not find in the best writers of
our age! It is not all pure gold; but whether we take a religious, a
moral, or an intellectual point of view, we may not affirm of the
literature of any age or country that it is perfect. When man clothes in
words what he thinks and loves, what he knows and believes, his work
bears the marks of his defects not less than those of his qualities.
Nay, if we turn to the Bible itself, how much do we not find there which
we either fail to comprehend or are unable to apply! Has not the mind of
Christendom been trained and illumined by the literatures of Greece and
Rome, which in moral purity, in elevation of sentiment, in breadth and
depth of thought, in the knowledge of the laws of Nature, in scientific
accuracy, in sympathy and tenderness, are altogether inferior to the
best writings of our own day? It is a mistake to suppose that this is a
material age in which the love of religion, of poetry, of art, of
excellence of whatever kind, is dead. The love of what is best has never
at any time been alive save in the hearts of the chosen few; and in such
souls it burns now with as sweet and steady a glow as when Plato spoke,
and the blessed Saviour ut