man in Great Britain can vote, no matter whether he is poor or rich, whether he has knowledge or no knowledge, there must be a very great change.  Before the great day of the Lord shall come, the valleys are to go up and the mountains are to come down; and the mountains have started already in Great Britain and must come down.  There may be an aristocracy in any nation,—­that is to say, there may be “best men”; there ought to be an aristocracy in every community,—­that is, an aristocracy of men who speak the truth, who are just, who are intelligent:  but that aristocracy will be like a wave of the sea; it has to be reconstituted in every generation, and the men who are the best in the State become the aristocracy of that State.  But where rank is hereditary, if political suffrage becomes free and universal, aristocracy cannot live.  The spirit of the gospel is democratic.  The tendency of the gospel is leveling; leveling up, not down.  It is carrying the poor and the multitude onward and upward.

It is said that democracies have no great men, no heroic men.  Why is it so?  When you raise the average of intelligence and power in the community it is very hard to be a great man.  That is to say, when the great mass of citizens are only ankle-high, when among the Lilliputians a Brobdingnagian walks, he is a great man.  But when the Lilliputians grow until they get up to his shoulder, he is not so great a man as he was by the whole length of his body.  So, make the common people grow, and there is nobody tall enough to be much higher.

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The remarkable people of this world are useful in their way; but the common people, after all, represent the nation, the age, and the civilization.  Go into any town or city:  do not ask who lives in that splendid house; do not say, This is a fine town, here are streets of houses with gardens and yards, and everything that is beautiful the whole way through.  Go into the lanes, go into the back streets, go where the mechanic lives; go where the day-laborer lives.  See what is the condition of the streets there.  See what they do with the poor, with the helpless, and the mean.  If the top of society bends perpetually over the bottom with tenderness, if the rich and strong are the best friends of the poor and needy, that is a civilized and a Christian community; but if the rich and the wise are the cream and the great bulk of the population skim-milk, that is not a prosperous community.

There is a great deal of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the community.  If there is one thing that stood out more strongly than any other in the ministry of our Lord, it is the severity with which he treated the exclusiveness of men with knowledge, position, and a certain sort of religion, a religion of particularity