PROLEGOMENON. 27 



the vision in the soul, as a success, or to drop, half developed, 

 half made up, or even still-born, into the silence of oblivion? 

 As a project, philanthropic, benevolent, and at first sight 

 not having in it the bone and muscle of a common business- 

 enterprise, must it share the fate of all efforts to bless, re- 

 generate, and save the rebellious savage, man, from sin and 

 degradation, disease and death? Will no enterprise live on 

 earth for the good of humanity unconnected with the 

 curse of gain? Will men endorse nothing but projects that 

 have three per cent, a month in them secured by real es- 

 tate? Will they engage heartily in nothing except the 

 organization and creation of cunningly-devised institutions 

 to catch each other, and by which the head-man the cun- 

 ning, sharp man, whose symbol is the fox shall subjugate 

 the hand-man, or innocent "creator in the finite," whose 

 symbol is the patient ox bowing his neck to the yoke? 

 And in a world that has been praying for long hundreds of 

 years for the kingdom of heaven to come, that the Great 

 Will might be done on earth as it is in those blissful abodes, 

 and where philosophers and prophets, seers and saints, 

 have heralded the advent of all orders of millenniums, with 

 the reign of peace and good-will, of mercy and love, will 

 it come at last that men and angels shall tremble to behold 

 the Dollar "a solitary God, over ghastly ruin frowning 

 forever from his throne" ? Will nothing that has the soul 

 in it succeed on this planet ? Have men SWORN to propa- 

 gate evil and disease only, viciously and insanely hazarding 

 the permanent and eternal degradation of their race ? Will 

 no human being try the experiment of publishing a clean 

 and normal life of the body and heavenly life of the soul, 

 with soundness of one, and some disinterested benevolence 

 in the other? Is the element of mutual antagonism and self- 

 ishness the wax that sticks and holds the world together, 

 whilst the "love of the neighbor," the "self-denial and re- 

 nunciation," the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, 

 which are always to be FIRST, are antediluvian fogyisms, 

 too slow and simple for the rapidly-rushing (progressive, 



