good, the doors of the museums and galleries which we have purchased, and for the maintenance of which we pay. But I would have them not only prepare for the coming change, but to aid and further it by anticipation. They will thus, in a new fashion, "dish the Whigs," prove themselves men of foresight and common sense, and obtain a fresh lease of the respect of the community.
As the years roll by, the term "materialist" will lose more and more of its evil connotation; for it will be more and more seen and acknowledged that the true spiritual nature of man is bound up with his material condition. Wholesome food, pure air, cleanliness—hard work if you will, but also fair rest and recreation—these are necessary not only to physical but to spiritual well-being. The seed of the spirit is cast in vain amid stones and thorns, and thus your best utterances become idle words when addressed to the acclimatized inhabitants of our slums and alleys. Drunkenness ruins the substratum of resolution. The physics of the drunkard's brain are incompatible with moral strength. Here your first care ought to be to cleanse and improve the organ. Break the sot's associations; change his environment; alter his nutrition; displace his base imaginations by thoughts drawn from the purer sources which we seek to render accessible to him. For two centuries, I am told, the Scottish clergy have proclaimed walking on Sunday to be an act of "Heaven-daring profaneness—an impious encroachment on the inalienable prerogative of the Lord God." Such language is now out of date. If we could establish Sunday tramways between our dens of filth and iniquity and the nearest green fields, we should, in so doing, be preaching a true gospel. And not only the denizens of our slums, but the proprietors of our factories and counting houses, might perhaps be none the worse for an occasional excursion in the company of those whom they employ. A most blessed influence would also be shed upon the clergy if they were enabled from time to time to change their "sloth urbane" for healthy action on heath or mountain. Baxter was well aware of the soothing influence of fields, and countries, and walks, and gardens on a fretted brain. Jeremy Taylor showed a profound knowledge of human nature when he wrote thus: "It is certain that all which can innocently make a man cheerful, does also make him charitable. For grief, and age, and sickness, and weariness, these are peevish and troublesome; but mirth and cheerfulness are content, and civil, and compliant, and communicative, and love to do good, and swell up to felicity only upon the wings of charity. Upon this account, here is pleasure enough for a Christian at present; and if a facete discourse, and an amicable friendly mirth, can refresh the spirit and take it off from the vile temptation of peevish, despairing, uncomplying melancholy, it must needs be innocent and commendable." I do not know whether you ever read Thomas Hood's "Ode to Rae Wilson," with an extract from which I will close this address. Hood was a humorist, and to some of our graver theologians
