Now if one, at the time of the crusades, had so anticipated the spirit of the age, as to picture to himself modern Europe and America, manufacturing, trading, flocking to California, as if there a holy sepulcher was to be rescued from hands profane, glorying chiefly in mechanical development and mercantile enterprize; and had ventured to suggest, that instead of trooping to Asia to fight for glory, and the fancy of promoting religion by arguments of steel, it would be worthier of the choice spirits of the age to stay at home, and by industry and enterprize aim at multiplying the means of content to quiet life:  he might have found a harder task than now devolves on him, who urges, that the materialism of this age must pass away, as has passed the chivalry of the crusades; both for the same reason; the progress of thought must outgrow the one, as it has outgrown the other.

A new age with another spirit will be ushered in.  What is to be the spirit of that age?  Are we to find the forebodings in the dreamy sentimentalism, which boasts so much its flights beyond common material ideas?  I trow rather, we may trace the character of the coming age in an increasing estimation of health, knowledge, mental cultivation, intellectual life, and the flow of the social affections, as the prime of earthly felicities—­in an approximation towards rationally estimating money (with the ability to command it) as the means of meeting one’s capacities of enjoyment—­to be no longer worshipped as itself the idol or the end.

When a pestilential disease breaks out in the city, the plainness and urgency of the case compel all to see in the sickness of one the danger of all.  Wants and discomforts, which charity had been too cold to attend to, now considered as sources of contagion, are administered to with a ready alacrity.  The law is recognized, according to which, “if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.”  And this law will be more fully recognized, as self-love is educated—­as men better understand their own welfare, and choose with reference to the whole of their nature, and the duration of their existence.

Self-love is a motive of the indifferent kind—­not of itself essentially good or bad.  This appears from its being an essential part of our nature.  Indeed, we can hardly conceive it as within the province of Omnipotence, to create a rational sentient being, who should be indifferent to his own happiness.

The advantages accruing from an educated self-love are: 

First, additional security, that the good work of charity be done; and to all but the individual doer, it may matter little what be the prompting motives.

Secondly, the expansion of yet nobler principles.  Each act favors the growth of the sentiments, of which it is the expression.  So he who does as benevolence bids, though from a motive secondary on the score of purity, will be likely again to do the same from yet purer motives.  So at least if the essential principle be there, though appearing no more vividly than as a cold sense of duty.