Now if one, at the time of the crusades, had so anticipated the spirit
of the age, as to picture to himself modern Europe and America,
manufacturing, trading, flocking to California, as if there a holy
sepulcher was to be rescued from hands profane, glorying chiefly in
mechanical development and mercantile enterprize; and had ventured to
suggest, that instead of trooping to Asia to fight for glory, and the
fancy of promoting religion by arguments of steel, it would be worthier
of the choice spirits of the age to stay at home, and by industry and
enterprize aim at multiplying the means of content to quiet life:
he might have found a harder task than now devolves on him, who urges,
that the materialism of this age must pass away, as has passed the
chivalry of the crusades; both for the same reason; the progress of
thought must outgrow the one, as it has outgrown the other.

A new age with another spirit will be ushered in. What is to be the
spirit of that age? Are we to find the forebodings in the dreamy
sentimentalism, which boasts so much its flights beyond common material
ideas? I trow rather, we may trace the character of the coming age in
an increasing estimation of health, knowledge, mental cultivation,
intellectual life, and the flow of the social affections, as the prime
of earthly felicities--in an approximation towards rationally
estimating money (with the ability to command it) as the means of
meeting one's capacities of enjoyment--to be no longer worshipped as
itself the idol or the end.

When a pestilential disease breaks out in the city, the plainness and
urgency of the case compel all to see in the sickness of one the danger
of all. Wants and discomforts, which charity had been too cold to
attend to, now considered as sources of contagion, are administered to
with a ready alacrity. The law is recognized, according to which, "if