them dangerous to themselves and others. He had to feed even before he could instruct them; to become the maker of their bread before he could be the Saviour of their souls. A solemn and most tardily recognized truth was here divinely affirmed. The physical and material degradation of the world has been the first and the chief cause of its moral and spiritual destitution. The science of supporting great bodies of people upon this planet in any other than a predatory, uncertain, and clashing way, has been one of very slow and difficult progress. But distinctly to recognize destitution, not as the curse of God upon those on whom it fell, but as the providential stimulus to effort, and the divine incentive to compassion; to regard it as a problem capable of solution, or worth the profoundest intellectual and moral sacrifices to fathom it, was left to our Saviour. It was the mightiest step in human progress when the faintness of the people gained the compassion, in place of the dread and fear, of the great leader of the civilization of Christendom. To see and allow that men were made wicked, dangerous, and hopeless mainly by their wants; that thus they were shut up to criminality, kept base and fierce by the necessity of their condition; to pity them for this calamity; still more, to look upon it as one which it was the duty and privilege of the fortunate, the instructed, and the rich to relieve or remove, this was the longest stride on, the highest step up, which the gospel made, politically considered. But this is not all: the second ground of our Saviour's compassion for the multitudes is like unto the first. First, hunger, which stands for all other degrees, and implies all other forms, of destitution, moved his pity. Next, their unsocialized and neglected condition; or, to use his own words, because they were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd." In that grazing country, infested with wild beasts, where the flocks of the opulent were never sent to pasture without a strong force of protectors, our Lord could not have used a more striking illustration than this. It was not exclusively, or even primarily, the want of spiritual instruction that he compassionated in the multitudes; but their lack of all social and civilizing guidance and protection. They were not considered as within the fold of society, but kept outside with the beasts, - from a general conviction, that they must prey upon society if society did not leave them outside its pale to devour each other, or be devoured by want and exposure. The greatest misfortune the human race can experience grows out of, and is connected with, its greatest necessity and blessing. It cannot obey the first condition of its perpetuity, - Increase and multiply, and possess the earth, without general dispersion: it cannot have general dispersion without driving far the largest portions of the race outside the spheres of social culture and civil polity. The world, if the Scriptures are credible, did not commence in savagery or barbarism, but upon true civilized principles, in family life, and with rules of social subordination and order. But it necessarily fell, as a whole, into barbarism, through the inevitable disproportion which the rapid growth of its population bore to the slow increase in its machinery of intercourse and commerce. The people multiplied and dispersed faster, vastly faster, than law and order, traditionary truth and wisdom, could follow them. Civilization, young and delicate, was compelled to shelter itself within the most circumscribed limits; and, beyond its self-protecting walls, the masses of humanity were scattered abroad, without the means and materials of self-elevation. For many generations, the disproportion between the civilized and the savage world must have been constantly increasing in favor of barbarism. Indeed, the ratio must have continued to become ever more and more frightful, as the geometrical increase of the earth's population faster and faster outstripped the arithmetical increase of its socialized and civil portions. In the absolute ignorance of the physical geography of the world, - which was not then even called a globe, - no bounds could be placed to the probable growth of this despairing disproportion of the savage to the civilized, of the predatory and outcast to the orderly and moralized, portion of the human race. So long as the earth held out, there was room for a boundless in ! crease in the ratio of ignorance, brute force, and animal neces- VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. I. 8 * humanity as a whole, or of the safety of society. When, therefore, our Saviour compassionated the multitudes, because they were scattered abroad, he bestowed on them the pity they most needed. Next to absolute hunger, exclusion from social and civil privileges, by a wandering, dispersed, and uncalculated life, is man's greatest misfortune, and the chief source of his moral and spiritual degradation. We may talk of spontaneous genius, of self-correcting powers and attributes in humanity, of necessary, self-evolved improvement as the true hope for the masses; we may reason about the natural and inevitable tendencies of man to civilization and progress: if we leave out of this calculation the providence of God, - which has chosen centres of light and life, kindled altars of piety, written tables of law, and erected models and standards of domestic, social, and civil life, which are the primal and chief means for the education and rescue of the race at large, - we shall lose the only key to the history of the world, and the only clue to the substantial progress of the race. Probably there is no tendency in savage or barbarous tribes and races to self-elevation, - only a capacity for improvement, under the guidance and inspiration of higher branches of the one great family, specially prepared by God for this work. Specially, God has committed to modern civilization, which is the child of Christianity, the salvation of the world. Civilization has, by approximate steps, reached the conviction, that there is no way of civilizing but by intercourse; and that intercourse is worth little or nothing except it be easy, constant, and general. It has perceived that the "scattering abroad" - Christ's own ground of compassion - was still the great obstacle to progress; and, therefore, the grand instinct of modern efforts at improvement has been road-making, - the construction of the highways of civilization, - ways on land, ways over water, ways through air, ways under ocean; ways between civilized and civilized, the more to strengthen each other by exchange of wisdom, experience, and products; ways between civilized and uncivilized, to extend knowledge and commerce and industrial arts; ways into Africa and New Holland; ways to the neighborhoods of the Northern and the Southern Poles; ways to the Pacific and across the Atlantic; ways for the products of subdued fields, conquered streams, and powers of nature enslaved to man's will; for the products of the loom, the forge, and the plough; ways for the traveller, be he the missionary of commerce, of science, or of religion - each equally valuable and all co-operative; ways for thought, the greatest of all products, the most urgent and enterprising of all travellers, the grandest of missionaries. To throw the net of roads, - its woof of iron and stone, its warp of wire and water, that great net, of which every track that civilized man pursues, whether with his foot, his beast, his wheel, his sail, his iron-rail, his electric flash, is a mesh that catches and holds in some estray and outcast interest, some scattered and otherwise lost member of humanity, - this is the providential passion and sacred instinct of modern civilization. It is the perpetuity of Christ's compassion that inspires and vivifies this grand movement. That the multitudes may not faint, may not be scattered abroad, Christian civilization must seek them, must hem them in, bind them to its girdle, make swift ways to the scenes of their ignorance and their despair, pierce their rivers and jungles, cross their deserts with the rail, abolish oceans and seas, and declare every part and portion of the earth explored, open, safe, related, in connection with all other parts, and so united to the race, to Christ, and to God. And now, finally, within the bounds of Christendom - at any rate, within the bounds of that happiest and most blessed portion of it which we occupy - a new and higher sentiment than even that of compassion, through the grace of God and his Son, animates our hearts when we look on the multitudes, -the sentiment of confidence and hope. Fear gave way, in our Saviour's courageous and loving mind, to compassion, when he saw the multitude. Have not the reasons for that compassion-at least within our immediate sphere of life and influence-most sensibly lessened, and almost totally disap. peared, under the influence of the Saviour's own ever-advancing work? He himself, new as compassion then was, did not |