There is want and
misery. I know it too well. There are great confusions to be
organised, great anomalies to be suppressed. But remember, that if
want and misery, confusion and anomaly were _the rule_ of London,
and not (as they are) the exception, then London, instead of
increasing at its present extraordinary pace, would decay; London
work, instead of being better and better done, would be worse and
worse done, till it stopped short in some such fearful convulsion as
that of Paris in 1793. No, my friends; compare London with any city
on the Continent; compare her with the old Greek and Roman cities;
with Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, with that Imperial Rome
itself, which was like London in nothing but its size, and then
thank God for England, for freedom, and for the Church of Christ.
And yet I have called London a wilderness. I have. There is a
wilderness of want; but there is a wilderness of wealth likewise.
And the latter is far more dangerous to human nature than the former
one. It is not in the waste and howling wilderness of rock, and
sand and shingle, with its scanty acacia copses, and groups of date
trees round the lonely well, that nature shews herself too strong
for man, and crushes him down to the likeness of the ape. There the
wild Arab, struggling to exist, and yet not finding the struggle
altogether too hard for him, can gain and keep, if not spiritual
life, virtue and godliness, yet still something of manhood;
something of--
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, thought, and skill.
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