Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the religious organizations of this country, was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom[405] on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion.  I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question:  and how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours?  How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organization as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness?  Indeed, the strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection held by the religious organizations,—­expressing, as I have said, the most widespread effort which the human race has yet made after perfection,—­ is to be found in the state of our life and society with these in possession of it, and having been in possession of it I know not how many hundred years.  We are all of us included in some religious organization or other; we all call ourselves, in the sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before noticed, children of God.  Children of God;—­it is an immense pretension!—­and how are we to justify it?  By the works which we do, and the words which we speak.  And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London!  London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia,[406]—­to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato’s mouth about Rome,—­unequalled in the world!  The word, again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circulation in England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph![407] I say that when our religious organizations—­which I admit to express the most considerable effort after perfection that our race has yet made—­land us in no better result than this, it is high time to examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see whether it does not leave out of account sides and forces of human nature which we might turn to great use; whether it would not be more operative if it were more complete.  And I say that the English reliance on our religious organizations and on their ideas of human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,—­mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection.