alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of
personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their
hearts, disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing
splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men
spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their
opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any
serious meaning, there was none remaining beyond the circle of the
silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual atmosphere was
saturated with cant--cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an
affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct and
flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The
truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their
real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and
the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural
forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again resolved."

Next I am going, as I promised, to consider those indulgences which
become luxuries by excessive use, and in this I shall be led also to
consider the effects of luxury. It has become a very trite saying that
riches do not bring happiness; and certainly luxury, which riches can
command, does not bring content, which is the greatest of all pleasures.
On the contrary, the moment the body or mind is over-indulged in any way,
it immediately demands more of the same indulgence, and even in stronger
doses. Who does not know that too much wine makes one desire more? Who,
after reading a novel, does not feel a longing for another?

The rich and poor dog, as we all know, meet and discourse of these things
in Burns's poem--

"Frae morn to e'en it's naught but toiling