bloody world.  Virtue we want, but virtue growing out of the bosom of universal justice.  While you labor to save one soul, poverty crushes a million into sin.  You are plucking brands from a constantly increasing conflagration.  The flames continue to advance and devour what you have saved.  The religion of the world must be built on universal prosperity, and this is only possible on a foundation of universal justice.  If the web of the cloth is knotted in one place it is because the threads have, in an unmeaning tangle, been withdrawn from another part.  Human misery is the correlative and equivalent of injustice somewhere else in society.

“What the world needs is a new organization—­a great world-wide Brotherhood of Justice.  It should be composed of all men who desire to lift up the oppressed and save civilization and society.  It should work through governmental instrumentalities.  Its altars should be the schools and the ballot-boxes.  It should combine the good, who are not yet, I hope, in a minority, against the wicked.  It should take one wrong after another, concentrate the battle of the world upon them, and wipe them out of existence.  It should be sworn to a perpetual crusade against every evil.  It is not enough to heal the wounds caused by the talons of the wild beasts of injustice; it should pursue them to their bone-huddled dens and slay them.” [Great applause.] “It should labor not alone to relieve starvation, but to make starvation impossible;—­to kill it in its causes.

“With the widest toleration toward those who address themselves to the future life, even to the neglect of this, the sole dogma of our society should be justice.  If there is an elysium in the next world, and not a continuation of the troubled existence through which we are now passing, we will be all the better fitted to enjoy it if we have helped to make this world a heaven.  And he who has labored to make earth a hell should enjoy his workmanship in another and more dreadful world, forever and forever.

“And oh, ye churches!  Will ye not come up to the help of the people against the mighty?  Will ye not help us break the jaws of the spoiler and drag the prey from between his teeth?  Think what you could do if all your congregation were massed together to crush the horrid wrongs that abound in society!  To save the world you must fight corruption and take possession of government.  Turn your thoughts away from Moses and his ragged cohorts, and all the petty beliefs and blunders of the ancient world.  Here is a world greater than Moses ever dreamed of.  Here is a population infinitely vaster in numbers, more enlightened, more capable of exquisite enjoyment, and exquisite suffering, than all the children of Israel and all the subjects of imperial Rome combined.  Come out of the past into the present.  God is as much God to-day as he was in the time of the Pharaohs.  If God loved man then he loves him now.  Surely the cultured denizen of this enlightened century, in the midst of all the splendors of his transcendent civilization, is as worthy of the tender regard of his Creator as the half-fed and ignorant savage of the Arabian desert five thousand years ago.  God lives yet, and he lives for us.”