and be accept

need not be so marked, but might pass able to God under a generally pious intention. But although, in any attempt at such definition, we should be bewildered with hopeless difficulties, yet in the daily tenor of life it is not found very difficult to discern and apply a practical rule, according to which it is probable that most persons of just and faithful conscience accompany every act and undertaking which appears to them on reflection of any considerable moment, with a positive reference to God; while for the rest they will seek that their sense of His presence, and of their duty and dependence, may be progressively quickened and enhanced, so that the lively regard to His will may become more and more extensively applicable to their thoughts, words, and deeds, individually as well as generally, and with explicit as well as with implicit intention.

83. Now I submit that the case is very similar with respect to combinations of men. Many of them are, with respect to the whole sum of our life, trifling and infinitesimal. In many of them, whatever in their personality is moral is so merged in other, by supposition inferior, and yet predominant, elements, that it would not admit of receiving a specifically religious form any more than the religious element in the smaller acts of the individual life. Yet even of this class I am inclined to think the number, though great, is yet not so large as has often been supposed. The impressive admonition of our social circumstances begins to warn us that we are less secure in dealing with men as animals and machines, and abandoning

the cultivation of their higher nature, than we had assumed.* In many more the case is doubtful, and must be governed by a considerate reference to circumstances. In some, as the family and the State, the character of the combination so essentially requires the predominance of the moral element, that its copious interfusion needs to be secured by that specifically suitable provision which has been here discussed under the name of collective or joint religion. It is, of course, impossible to lay down any antecedent rule in such subject-matter, which shall govern cases as they arise with the precision of a mathematical formula.

84. I do not, however, hesitate to go one step further, and to say that it is the infirmity and not the strength of our nature which prevents our applying to minor acts of the individual life a distinct religious consciousness, which should exist anew for each, and should modify each throughout, just as our physical infirmity causes our need not less of the microscope than of the telescope. Indefinite magnitude and indefinite minuteness alike elude the scope of our perceptions, and alike evince our littleness. If we make this a matter of mutual congratulation, we are selfcondemned, we are glorying in our shame; and even

*The Rhymney Mining Company resolved, on the 21st November, 1838, to build a church for the use of their labourers, and to endow it with the sum of 40007.- (Bishop of Llandaff's Address at Abergavenny, October 10, 1839, to the local Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.) It appears also, that the Birmingham Railway Company have voted 10007. towards the erection of a church at Wolverton, with leave to dissentient proprietors to withhold their quota.

so in the case of corporations of men, having in their immediate view temporal objects, it is a matter to be viewed with some mixture of regret that they can so rarely be formed with direct reference to the principles of religion, under the present circumstances of society, or owing, in part, to the permanent constitution of our nature. Even the production of physical and scientific results is not a matter which ought abstractedly to be apart from religion; and everything which tends, by the law of association, to separate any portion of our life from the supervision of divine faith, is in itself so far unfortunate, and likewise tends in the same degree to weaken the hold of religion as a master principle on the residue.

85. It certainly ennobles the tenure of landed property, that the realisation of its profits is so intimately blended with a thousand opportunities of moral duty and of religious influence. It is, on the contrary, an unhappy condition of some descriptions of pecuniary speculation, that, while they are made effective through the labour of human agents, they usually form with those agents no reciprocal relations, except those which are pecuniary, and yet put them to employments exercising a ruling influence upon their moral condition. I will take, for example, the class of mining companies. They probably have many servants whose lives they expose to constant risk; many whom the discharge of their tasks may detach from domestic associations and from regularity of habits. The nature of these undertakings tends again to create a shifting population,

and to destroy that local fixity which, with the lower class in particular, is one of the main guarantees of respectability. Perhaps the necessary course of the business may require that a portion of those employed should be denied their Sabbath rest. The workmen are remunerated for these moral sacrifices in gold, upon a scale which, as compared with the actual wants of persons similarly educated, supplies a rapid and disproportionate increase to their means, and thereby greatly increases their temptations, while there is no counteractive provision usually made to neutralise these undoubtedly noxious influences.

86. Such things are but too true, real, and practical. The evidence of facts may, and that soon, supersede the necessity of arguments to prove that such a disposal of human labour, however apparently productive, secretly undermines the foundations of society. It is enough for my purpose to have shown, that if the mind and conscience of our own time were sufficiently harmonised and enlightened to admit of adequate securities for uniformly annexing a provision for religious ordinances to the schemes of temporal enterprise and pecuniary aggrandisement, we should probably avoid many kinds of evil which are now engendered among us, on a fearful scale, by the separation of the two, as respects a large portion of our population; and therefore, in assenting to the proposition that there are some combinations of men to which, at the present time in particular, it is impossible to apply the principle of collective religion, it seems to me most

becoming and rational to do so, not with any selfgratulatory admiration of this feature in our character or condition, but rather with shame and deprecation of the Divine displeasure.

87. I return then to the position, that, as the nation fulfils the great conditions of a person, a real unity of being, of deliberating, of acting, of suffering; and these in a definite manner, and upon an extended scale, and with immense moral functions to discharge, and influences to exercise, both upon its members and extrinsically therefore it has that kind of clear, large, and conscious responsibility which can alone be met by its specifically professing a religion, and offering, through its organ the State, that worship which shall publicly sanctify its acts. That which, by its governing organ, it professes specially, it must encourage and maintain throughout its inferior members as a part of such profession itself.

88. But some minds are staggered by the objection, that a nation, like other forms of human incorporation, is not immortal; that no retribution and no reward await it in a future state; or, as it is sometimes said, that corporations have no souls. But corporations have souls quite as much as they have bodies, and it will hardly be held that they have neither. They have souls; they have deliberative minds; they have personality, and with it responsibility. Grant that public personalities are limited to the sphere of this world: this does not destroy their moral obligations. Suppose the doctrine of a future state, as it respects