e emergency of defence arises, no man
can really perform his duty by the payment of money or the providing of
a substitute; for that which makes a country strong is not armies or
cannon, but life. The Moors held Grenada, in the midst of Spain, for
years, the Swiss have remained amid the storms of Europe for centuries,
a Rome of huts went out to conquer the world, while a Rome of palaces is
doomed to invasion and death. Every nation has money enough, if it have
only patriotism and its attendant courage. Even if war has become
mechanical and men fight at a distance, so that the courage of a hand to
hand conflict is of no avail, it finally comes to the same result; a
nation needs not cannon or armies, but men whose hands are strong and
whose minds are quick because of the love in their hearts. No man
performs his duty unless he sends a substitute of equal bravery and
patriotism to that which he should himself possess, and then he must do
the substitute's duty by going in his place. Politicians and hired
soldiery can neither govern nor protect a country; it needs the people
themselves as individuals.

In religion, no man pretends to say that a class of men can perform the
duty which each man owes to God, and the person who should say such a
thing would be considered in jest or partially deranged. Yet it is so
tacitly held, and practically believed. As the man sits in his cushioned
seat on the Lord's day, and looks up at the stately edifice which he has
helped to build, and hears the eloquent words of the preacher whom he in
part pays, he has a comfortable feeling that his work is done. To be
sure, no man can love God without knowing Him, and none can know Him
well without a careful and intelligent study of His works in creation
and revelation; but the man himself has no time for this, he has
something else to do, and if he but hire another to dig out these
truths, and present them to him, as it were ready made, of a Sunday, he
considers that it is enough. The preacher performs the thinking and the
architect the acting of man's duty to God. So the world goes on;
religion is merely logical, mechanical, a kind of 'greatest amount of
happiness' affair, a lubricant to make the wheels of society move on
smoothly, instead of being from the soul, dynamical, giving love and
life to the world.

This mechanical tendency has also an element which makes it worse than
any corresponding state in former times, for these at least contained