is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along with us.  “The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world,” says the wise man.  And to this effect that excellent and often quoted guide of ours, Bishop Wilson, has some striking words:—­“It is not,” says he, “so much our neighbour’s interest as our own that we love him.”  And again he says:  “Our salvation does in some measure depend upon that of others.”  And the author of the Imitation puts the same thing admirably when he says:—­“Obscurior etiam via ad coelum videbatur quando tam pauci regnum coelorum quaerere curabant,"+—­the fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.  So all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress towards perfection, [242] if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery, such as manufactures or population,—­which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so,—­ create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and perforce they must for the most part be left by us in their degradation and wretchedness.  But evidently the conception of free-trade, on which our Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which they think they have found the secret of national prosperity,—­ evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, for this end, of manufactures and population, threatens to create for us, if it has not created already, those vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people,—­one pauper, at the present moment, for every nineteen of us,—­to the existence of which we are, as we have seen, absolutely forbidden to reconcile ourselves, in spite of all that the philosophy of The Times and the poetry of Mr. Robert Buchanan may say to persuade us.

[243] And though Hebraism, following its best and highest instinct,—­ identical, as we have seen, with that of Hellenism in its final aim, the aim of perfection,—­teaches us this very clearly; and though from Hebraising counsellors,—­the Bible, Bishop Wilson, the author of the Imitation,—­I have preferred (as well I may, for from this rock of Hebraism we are all hewn!) to draw the texts which we use to bring home to our minds this teaching; yet Hebraism seems powerless, almost as powerless as our free-trading Liberal friends, to deal efficaciously with our ever-accumulating masses of pauperism, and to prevent their accumulating still more.  Hebraism builds churches, indeed, for these masses, and sends missionaries among them; above all, it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of The Times, and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable; but with regard to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led to the very same conclusions, though