Look back over the past and see if it is not in conflict with these great world evils, themselves the results of man’s moral blindness and sin, that we have worked out the true principles of our life, the higher possibilities of our humanity.

Take the most elementary case first, man’s disobedience to the physical laws under which he must live to have a sound mind in a sound body.  Man in his primitive stages is emphatically not a clean animal.  On the contrary, he is a very dirty one.  He has none of the cat’s dainty neatness and cleanliness, none of her instinctive recognition of the deodorizing and purifying power of the earth, that makes the foulest thing once buried spring up in fresh grass and fragrant flowers.  He has nothing of the imperative impulse of the little ant which he treads under his lordly feet to shampoo his brother, let alone himself.  It has needed the discipline and the suffering of the ages to evolve that great banner of progress, the clean shirt.  From what great world pestilences has he not had to suffer as the consequences of his own uncleanliness!  Cholera has been rightly called the beneficent sanitary inspector of the world.  With what foul diseases, the very details of which would sicken, has he not had to be scourged withal to get him to recognize and obey the one Divine injunction, “Wash and be clean”!  Truly his knowledge and recognition of sanitary law, his “physical righteousness,” has had to be sown in the weakness and corruption of disease before it could be raised to the power of a recognized law of life, insuring that cleanliness which is next to godliness.

Again, take the great principle of national freedom,—­that a nation has a right to govern its own destinies.  With what world tyrannies and oppressions, the outcome of man’s selfish lust of power and wealth, have not the peoples had to fight and struggle in order at length to win and get recognized that principle of freedom without which a nation can be neither strong nor holy, neither a citadel nor a temple!  The Iron Duke used to say, “There is but one thing worse than a battle gained, and that is a battle lost.”  Yet what battles lost and what battles gained, with all their sickening sights and sounds—­

    “Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
    Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of lungs,
    In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
    Moans of the dying and voices of the dead”;

what bloody conflicts through the long ages have not had to be fought out to gain this freedom!  Truly we might apostrophize Freedom in the words of the Hebrew prophet:  “Who is this that cometh with her garments dyed in blood?” Through what long centuries did not what Sir John Seeley called the “mechanical theory of government” survive, the theory which recognized no vital bond of blood and historical tradition between a people and its government, but looked upon nations as royal appanages,