en, and
worshipping with the holy.

Of the spiritual more grievously than of the intellectual life is it
true, that, "whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with
it." Here emphatically does the individual labor hardly, to digest
into his life the conclusions of reason and conscience, in advance of
the average understanding of the age. Professor Lyell, speaking of the
Millerite phrenzy, and how some men of pretty sound mind were carried
away with it, remarks to this effect: "Religious delusion is like a
famine fever, which attacks first the hungry and emaciated, but in its
progress cuts down many of the well-fed and robust."

So it is. So strong are our tendencies to one tone, that the
Christian, in setting to his worldly desires the bounds which his
religion exacts, feels to be exercising a self-denial--yielding the
temporal to the eternal. He scarce seems to himself to be acting the
part of true worldly wisdom. In reading the life of Dr. Payson, it is
obviously manifest, that his deeply spiritual views were not inwrought
harmoniously into his life's web, as would have been, if he had carried
along with him a whole community.

The materialism of this age must pass away, as has passed the quixotism
of the crusades. Each has but expressed a stage in the progress of
thought; and neither measures the mature life of the soul. It is not
so certain to sight, what will be next grasped by this reaching onward
to the things before; whether a better reconcilement of the life that
now is with that which is to come, or whether a vaporing, misty
sentimentalism is to be the spirit of the next age. There are not
wanting indications, that the materialism of this age is to be followed
by a dreamy spiritualism, raising men above the observance of vulgar
duties, but not above the practice of the grossest vices. It is not
uncharitable to mark such tendencies, where we see canonized Rousseau,
the very embodiment of sensuality, egotism, and misanthropy; and
progress _so_ taught to be the law of _individual_ man, that, whether
going to commit his crimes at the brothel, or to expiate them on the
gallows, his tendencies are still and forever upward.

We need better evidence than sight can afford, to say,--

"O no! a thousand cheerful omens give
Hope of yet happier days, whose dawn is nigh:
He who has tamed the elements, shall not live
The slave of his own passions; he whose eye
Unwinds