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
one member suffers, all the members suffer with it." And this law will
be more fully recognized, as self-love is educated--as men better
understand their own welfare, and choose with reference to the whole of
their nature, and the duration of their existence.
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