nd not by what we have, the right to
fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic
trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called
better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at
material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our
house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child
without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for
thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of
opinion.

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise
to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be
chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases.
Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our
chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are
thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave,
whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think
of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if
we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our
tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our
stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop,
our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would
imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to
set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its
servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented
with our poverty.

I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain
that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the
worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of
religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a
brief review and pass to my more general conclusions.

Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands
approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of
character. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be
temperamental endowments, found in non-religious individuals. But the
whole group of them forms a combination which, as such, is religious,
for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from its
psychological centre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes
naturally to think that