called—"to develope and improve" God's works on earth, and to create a universe according to the poor capacity of mankind. One had only to look at any of the large towns, or to think how people in the chief cities of the world herded together in hundreds of thousands like a new Tower of Babel, and did their best with coal dust, high houses, and tall chimneys to shut out God's sun and the fresh air—and one could not fail to see how the whole of this Society was built up in antagonism to Nature.
Or if one looked at persons—at these dressed-up ladies who, by means of all kinds of machines—"crinolines, corsets," or whatever the things were called—"improved" their appearance; if one looked at men, old and young, who got themselves up according to the latest Paris fashions, and by the help of pomades, wax, and hot irons robbed their hair and beards of every natural line. In fact, in great as in small things, one could not but notice this triumphant rebellion against the laws of nature.
Or if one went from the streets into the houses, and sought these people in their occupations, their recreations, their joys and their sorrows—everywhere one saw how modern civilization, in tearing mankind away from the ever youthful mother, Nature, had doomed them to a world of show and an existence of shams, which in the end they fancied to be the only true and real one. The tired workmen who in the evening
