bold and impudent slut, yet it is the simple truth that
she does sit as a queen over this world and over the men of this world.
For Madam Bubble has a royal family like all other sovereigns. She has a
court of her own, too, with its ball-room presentations and its birthday
honours. She has a cabinet council also, and a bar and a bench with
their pleadings and their decisions. Far more than all that, she has a
church which she has established and of which she is the head; and a
faith also of which she is the defender. She has a standing army also
for the extension and the protection of her dominions. She levies taxes,
too, and sends out ambassadors, and makes treaties, and forms offensive
and defensive alliances. But what a bubble all this World is to him
whose eyes have at last been opened to see the hollowness and the
heartlessness of it all! For all its pursuits and all its possessions,
from a child's rattle to a king's sceptre, all is one great bubble.
Wealth, fame, place, power; art, science, letters; politics, churches,
sacraments, and scriptures--all are so many bubbles in Madam Bubble's
World. This wicked enchantress, if she does not find all these things
bubbles already, by one touch of her evil wand she makes them so. She
turns gold into dross, God into an idle name, and His Word into words
only; unless when in her malice she turns it into a fruitful ground of
debate and contention; a ground of malice and hatred and ill-will. Vanity
of vanities; all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Still, she sits a
queen and a goddess to a great multitude: to all men, to begin with. And,
like a goddess, she sheds abroad her spirit in her people's hearts and
lifts up upon them for a time the light of her countenance.

2. "I am the mistress of the world," she says, "and men are made happy
by me."--I would like to see one of them. I have seen many men to whom
Madam Bubble had said that if they would be ruled by her she would make
them great and happy. But though I have seen not a few who have believed
her and let themselves be ruled by her, I have never yet seen one happy
man among them.--The truth is, Madam Bubble is not able to make men happy
even if she wished to do it. She is not happy herself, and she cannot
dispense to others what she does not possess. And, yet, such are her
sorceries that, while her old dupes die in thousands every day, new dupes
are born to her every day in still greater numbers. New dup