intellectuality, making of the men who work something more than mere machines themselves.  It is developing and perfecting a mightier engine than any of man’s invention; one that tyrants cannot always control, that kings cannot always manage.  That engine is the human mind.  Like the steam-engine, it is gathering power, and capability for the exercise of power, and the time will come when it will go crashing, with resistless energy, among thrones, overturning despotisms, upheaving dynasties, sweeping away those false theories of governmental institutions, which guarantee to one class of people a life of luxurious idleness, coupled with a prerogative to rule; and which dooms another class to an hereditary servitude, changeless as fate, and relentless as the grave.  It will vindicate the rights, and ennoble the destiny of the masses of the people who work.

“But where is this career of progress to end?  Is there a limit to this onward movement?  We know that the world has made greater advancement in the present century, than it did in the five thousand years preceding it, and that new discoveries in the sciences and the arts are being made every day.  Nature has been compelled, and is still being compelled, to yield up secrets which have been for centuries regarded as beyond the power of human capacity to penetrate.  How is this?  Is the world to go on thus, always?  Is this rush of progress to remain unchecked, always?  If so, what mystery, even of Omnipotent wisdom, will remain unsolved at last?  What results will not human energy be able to accomplish?  Is the time to come when man shall be able to shape out of clay, fashion from wood, or stone, an image of himself, and, breathing upon it, command it to walk forth a thing of life, and be obeyed?  Will he be able to search out a universal antidote to disease?  Will he discover the means of supplying the human frame with such recuperative power as will nullify the law that prescribes to all flesh the dilapidation and decay of age, of weakness and of death?  Will he search out some secret agency which will hold his body in perpetual youth, defying alike the attritions of age, and the ravages of disease?  Will he discover how it is that time saps the strength, and steals away the vigor of the human system, and a remedy for exhausted and wasted energies?  It is not my purpose to advance a theory based upon an affirmative answer to these inquiries, but when we contemplate the stupendous pace at which the world is moving forward, who will venture to assert where the limit to this progress is to be found?  You tell me that man cannot create; that he can only combine into new shapes elements which God has furnished to his hands.  I do not know this.  That he has not created I admit; but that he has not capabilities, as yet undeveloped, as a creator, I do not KNOW.  I will not venture the assertion that the time will ever come when he will have discovered wherein lies the mystery of life;