of an immense moral work on the earth.  Under its instructions he shall add improvement to improvement in that social fabric which is already his shelter and habitation.  He has found it of brick,—­he shall leave it of marble.  He shall seek out every contrivance, and perfect every plan, and exhaust every scheme, which will bring a greater prosperity and a nobler happiness to mankind.  He shall quarry out each human spirit, and carve it into the beauty and symmetry of a living stone that shall be worthy to take its place in the rising structure.  This is the work which is given him to do.  He must develop those conditions of virtue, and peace, and faith, and truth, and love, by which the race shall be lifted nearer its Creator, and the individual ascend into a more conscious neighborhood and stronger affinity to the world which shall receive him at last.  All this must that other department be, and this other capacity achieve or there is a fatal disproportion in the progress of man.

The beauty of this as a dream perhaps all men will admit; but they question its possibility.  “It is the old Utopia,” they say, “the impracticable enterprise that has always baffled the world.”  Some will doubt whether the Spiritual has an existence at all.  Others will doubt, if it does exist, whether man can accomplish anything in it.  It is invisible, impalpable, unknown.  It cannot be substantial, it cannot be real,—­at least to man as at present constituted.  Its elements and conditions cannot be controlled by his spirit.  That spirit cannot control itself,—­how much less go forth and work solid wonders in that phantom realm!  There can be no success in this that will be coequal with the other; nor a coequal grandeur.  There is no such thing as keeping pace with it.  The heart cannot grow better, society cannot be built higher, mankind cannot become happier, God will not draw nearer, the hidden truth of all that universe will never be more ascertained than it is,—­can never be accumulated and stored away among other human acquisitions.  It is utterly, gloomily impracticable.  In this respect we shall forever remain as we are, and where we are.  So they think.

And now we venture to contradict it all, and to assert that there is, there must be, just such a corresponding field, and just such a corresponding progress, or else (we say it reverently) God’s ways are not equal.  So great is our faith.  Like Columbus, therefore, we dream of the golden Indies, and of that “unknown residue” which must yet be found, and be taken possession of by mankind.

We look far out to where the horizon dips its vapory veil into the sea, and beyond which lies that other hemisphere, and ask,—­Is there no world there to be a counterpoise to the world that is here?  Has the Creator made no provision for the equilibrium of the soul?  Is all that infinite area a shoreless waste, over which the fleets of speculation may sail forever, and discover nothing?  Or is there not, rather, a broad and solid continent of spiritual truth, eternally rooted in that ocean,—­prepared, from the beginning, for the occupation of man, when the fulness of time shall have come,—­ordained to take its place in the historic evolution of the race, and to give the last and definite shape to its wondrous destinies?