Have we “Liberals”—­as we presume to call ourselves—­ever devised anything so well adapted as this to the needs of average mortals struggling with the ordinary troubles of life?  We know of nothing.  Philosophical treatises, and arithmetical computations respecting the number of people who inhabited Palestine, may have their use, but they cannot fill the aching void in the heart of a lone widow, or teach an anxious father how to manage a troublesome boy.  There was an old lady near us at this meeting,—­a good soul in a bonnet four fashions old,—­who sat and cried for joy, as the brethren carried on their talk.  She had come in alone from her solitary room, and enjoyed all the evening long a blended moral and literary rapture.  It was a banquet of delight to her, the recollection of which would brighten all her week, and it cost her no more than air and sunlight.  To the happy, the strong, the victorious, Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses may appear to suffice; but the world is full of the weak, the wretched, and the vanquished.

There was an infuriate heretic in Boston once, whose antipathy to what he called “superstition” was something that bordered upon lunacy.  But the time came when he had a child, his only child, and the sole joy of his life, dead in the house.  It had to be buried.  The broken-hearted father could not endure the thought of his child’s being carried out and placed in its grave without some outward mark of respect, some ceremonial which should recognize the difference between a dead child and a dead kitten; and he was fain, at last, to go out and bring to his house a poor lame cobbler, who was a kind of Methodist preacher, to say and read a few words that should break the fall of the darling object into the tomb.  The occurrence made no change in his opinions, but it revolutionized his feelings.  He is as untheological as ever; but he would subscribe money to build a church, and he esteems no man more than an honest clergyman.

If anything can be predicated of the future with certainty, it is, that the American people will never give up that portion of their heritage from the past which we call Sunday, but will always devote its hours to resting the body and improving the soul.  All our theologies will pass away, but this will remain.  Nor less certain is it, that there will always be a class of men who will do, professionally and as their settled vocation, the work now done by the clergy.  That work can never be dispensed with, either in civilized or in barbarous communities.  The great problem of civilization is, how to bring the higher intelligence of the community, and its better moral feeling, to bear upon the mass of people, so that the lowest grade of intelligence and morals shall be always approaching the higher, and the higher still rising.  A church purified of superstition solves part of this problem, and a good school system does the rest.