s, the many had learnt to consider themselves as things
and animals. And so they had become 'a mass,' that is, a mere heap of
inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in itself as
distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond, uniting each to
all. The 'masses' of the French had fallen into that state, before the
Revolution of 1793. The 'masses' of our agricultural labourers,--the
'masses' of our manufacturing workmen, were fast falling into that state
in the days of our grandfathers. Whether the French masses have risen
out of it, remains to be seen. The English masses, thanks to Almighty
God, have risen out of it; and by the very same factor by which the
middle-age masses rose--by Religion. The great Methodist movement of the
last century did for our masses, what the monks did for our forefathers
in the middle age. Wesley and Whitfield, and many another noble soul,
said to Nailsea colliers, Cornish miners, and all manner of drunken
brutalized fellows, living like the beasts that perish,--'Each of
you--thou--and thou--and thou--stand apart and alone before God. Each
has an immortal soul in him, which will be happy or miserable for ever,
according to the deeds done in the body. A whole eternity of shame or of
glory lies in you--and you are living like a beast.' And in proportion
as each man heard that word, and took it home to himself, he became a new
man, and a true man. The preachers may have mixed up words with their
message with which we may disagree, have appealed to low hopes and fears
which we should be ashamed to bring into our calculations;--so did the
monks: but they got their work done somehow; and let us thank them, and
the old Methodists, and any man who will tell men, in whatever clumsy and
rough fashion, that they are not things, and pieces of a mass, but
persons, with an everlasting duty, an everlasting right and wrong, an
everlasting God in whose presence they stand, and who will judge them
according to their works. True, that is not all that men need to learn.
After they are taught, each apart, that he is a man, they must be taught,
how to be an united people: but the individual teaching must come first;
and before we hastily blame the individualizing tendencies of the old
Evangelical movement, or that of the middle-age monks, let us remember,
that if they had not laid the foundation, others could not build thereon.

Besides, they built themselves, as well as they could,