FOURTH DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 277 



between Jonathan and John Bull some American De Lesseps will 

 cut a canal right through Central America, turn the Gulf Stream into 

 the Pacific, and freeze England into an iceberg? 



Do you say all this is fanciful? It is no more fanciful tlian it 

 would have seemed fifty years ago to predict that men would travel 

 by steam, talk by lightning, and make that subtle and terrible spirit 

 of the air, electricity, furnish the motive power to our machinery. 

 I believe that the progress of Christianity will yet bring about a moral 

 millenium. So the progress of civilization, science, and art are des- 

 tined to i)roduce a i)liysical, a material millenium. The time is to 

 come when our perfected race, redeemed from ignorance and sin, 

 shall rule right royally over their lower natures and over all the 

 forces and elements of matter. The Bible predicts that moral and 

 material millenium when mind shall be enthroned above matter 

 everywhere. Tiien, the primal curse removed, "instead of the thorn, 

 shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar, the myrtle tree. 

 Then gold siiall be cheap enough for paving stones, and pearls be 

 built into the city walls." In that golden age to come, when men 

 shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into prun- 

 ing hooks, when the wilderness shall blossom as the rose, ignorance, 

 poverty, toil, vice, and misery shall be known no more. I repeat, 

 that man has only captured the outposts of nature. He has only 

 landed on Plymouth Rock and the whole continent is before him. 



What is the first province man must conquer in his march from 

 the cradle to the throne ? Himself, his lowest nature. The soul 

 must dominate the body. The soul must sit enthroned within and 

 sway the little empire I now embrace within my two arms. I must 

 subjugate tliis little world before I seek other worlds to conquer. 

 The rebellious appetites and passions, desire, ambition, pride, the 

 unruly temper, and the unruly tongue, must be held under control, 

 for if they get the upperhand there will be such anarchy and ruin as 

 when the'^criminal classes ruled Paris during the Commune and the 

 Reign of Terror. Ah, what battles are fought on this miniature 

 battlefield! Marathon, Waterloo, Shiloh, the Wilderness, will not 

 compare with them, either for the fierceness of the conflict or its 

 far-reaching issues. These are but sham battles to those the true 

 man must fight and win over his lower nature. And this conquest 

 of the body must precede the conquest of outlying nature. See that 

 skilled artist at the piano, or that deft craftsman at the bench, or that 

 singer sweeping with the magic wand of song all the keys and chords 

 of the human heart. They illustrate to us the power of mind over 

 body. They teach us what obedient servants the organs of the body 

 may become. And as in the realm of art, so may it be in that of 

 morals. 



But I come now to speak of the various spheres in which man 

 asserts and maintains his royal prerogative as lord of creation. 



One of the sublimest passages in the sublimest book in the world 

 tells how the ocean lay in God's hand like a dewdrop in the heart of 

 of a rosebud, until He carved for it a dwelling place in earth's deep 

 bosom, and there set it to be the everlasting mirror .of his own infin- 

 ity. Then He appointed its metes and bounds, saying, " Hitherto 

 shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be 

 stayed." It is a sublime thought that God conquered old Ocean then 

 and shut it up in its prison-house. 



But man has conquered the ocean. He has made it the pathway of 



