that of the owner himself, that the master
of that palace had over him a King, to whom all that was foul,
neglectful, cruel, was inexpressibly hateful, so hateful that He once had
actually stepped off the throne of the universe to die for such creatures
as that poor idiot and her forgotten parents? Would you not question
whether the prayers offered up in that chapel would have any answer from
Him, save that awful answer He once gave? "When ye spread forth your
hands, I will hide mine eyes: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not
hear; your hands are full of blood."

Oh, my friends, you who understand my parable, has the awful thought
never struck you that such may be God's answer to the prayers of a nation
which leaves in its midst such barbarism, such heathenism, as exists in
every great town of this realm? And what if you were told next that the
laws of His kingdom were eternal and inexorable, and that one of His
cardinal laws is--that as a man sows, so shall he reap; that every sin
punishes itself, even though the sinner does not know that he has sinned;
that he who knew not his master's will, and did it not, shall be beaten
with few stripes; that the innocent babe does not escape unburnt, because
it knew not that fire burns; that the good man who lives in a malarious
alley does not escape fever and cholera, because he does not know that
dirt breeds pestilence; that, in a word, he who knew not his master's
will, and did it not, shall be beaten with few stripes; but that he who
knew his master's will, and did it not, shall be beaten with many
stripes? Then of how many and how heavy stripes, think you, will the
inhabitant of that palace be counted worthy, who has been taught by
Christianity for the last fifteen hundred years, and by physical science
and political economy for the last fifty years, and yet persists, in
defiance of his own knowledge, in leaving his used-up servants, and their
children and grand-children after them, to rot, body, mind, and soul, in
the very precincts of the palace, having no other excuse to offer for
this than that it is too much trouble to treat them better, and that, on
the whole, he can make money more rapidly by thus throwing away that
human dirt, and leaving it to decay where it can, regardless what it
pollutes and poisons; just as the manufacturer can make money more
rapidly by not consuming his own smoke, but letting it stream out of the
chim