the vice
and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer
turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he
proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I
confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: and how do you
propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a
life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far
removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the
life of your religious organization as you yourself reflect it, to
conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, the
strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the
clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection held
by the religious organizations,--expressing, as I have said, the most
widespread effort which the human race has yet made after perfection,--
is to be found in the state of our life and society with these in
possession of it, and having been in possession of it I know not how
many hundred years. We are all of us included in some religious
organization or other; we all call ourselves, in the sublime and
aspiring language of religion which I have before noticed, _children of
God_. Children of God;--it is an immense pretension!--and how are we to
justify it? By the works which we do, and the words which we speak. And
the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of
life, our _city_ which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London!
London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal
canker of _publice egestas, privatim opulentia_,[406]--to use the words
which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome,--unequalled in the
world! The word, again, which we children of God speak, the voice which
most hits our collective thought, the newspaper with the largest
circulation in England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole
world, is the _Daily Telegraph_![407] I say that when our religious
organizations--which I admit to express the most considerable effort
after perfection that our race has yet made--land us in no better result
than this, it is high time to examine carefully their idea of
perfection, to see whether it does not leave out of account sides and
forces of human nature which we might turn to great use; whether it
would not be more operative if it were more complete. And I say that the
English reliance on our reli