There exists at the present day a class that is morally apathetic.  In every village, in every hamlet, every detached group of cottages, there are numbers of labouring men who are simply indifferent to church and to chapel alike.  They neither deny nor affirm the primary truths taught in all places of worship; they are simply indifferent.  Sunday comes and sees them lounging about the cottage door.  They do not drink to excess, they are not more given to swearing than others, they are equally honest, and are not of ill-repute.  But the moral sense seems extinct—­the very idea of anything beyond gross earthly advantages never occurs to them.  The days go past, the wages are paid, the food is eaten, and there is all.

Looking at it from the purely philosophic point of view there is something sad in this dull apathy.  The most pronounced materialist has a faith in some form of beauty—­matter itself is capable of ideal shapes in his conception.  These people know no ideal.  It seems impossible to reach them, because there is no chord that will respond to the most skilful touch.  This class is very numerous now—­a disheartening fact.  Yet perhaps the activity and energy of the clergyman may be ultimately destined to find its reaction, to produce its effect among these very people.  They may slowly learn to appreciate tangible, practical work, though utterly insensible to direct moral teaching and the finest eloquence of the pulpit.  Finding by degrees that he is really endeavouring to improve their material existence, they may in time awake to a sense of something higher.

What is wanted is a perception of the truth that progress and civilisation ought not to end with mere material—­mechanical—­comfort or wealth.  A cottager ought to learn that when the highest wages of the best paid artisan are readied it is not the greatest privilege of the man to throw mutton chops to dogs and make piles of empty champagne bottles.  It might almost be said that one cause of the former extravagance and the recent distress and turbulence of the working classes is the absence of an ideal from their minds.

Besides this moral apathy, the cottager too often assumes an attitude distinctly antagonistic to every species of authority, and particularly to that prestige hitherto attached to property.  Each man is a law to himself, and does that which seems good in his own eyes.  He does not pause to ask himself, What will my neighbour think of this?  He simply thinks of no one but himself, takes counsel of no one, and cares not what the result may be.  It is the same in little things as great.  Respect for authority is extinct.  The modern progressive cottager is perfectly certain that he knows as much as his immediate employer, the squire, and the parson put together with the experience of the world at their back.  He is now the judge—­the infallible authority himself.  He is wiser far than all the learned and the thoughtful, wiser than the prophets themselves.  Priest, politician, and philosopher must bow their heads and listen to the dictum of the ploughman.