But they, just as much as we, have lost out
of mind the significance of the Christian idea. They, just as much as
we, have become thoroughly paganized--have become saturated with the
central idea of pagan civilization, that man is his own end, lives for
himself alone, and not for God, and therefore is inferior to and must be
the mere tool of the state. If Americans hold that the state can _make_
right, as well as enforce it, so do the English. If divine sanctions
have no longer any significance in America, so have they not in England.
If expediency, and not God's truth, is the universal rule of action
here, so is it there. If every American or 'Yankee' seeks his own end in
his own way, regardless of his neighbor, his Government, and his God, so
does every Englishman. The Englishman has no God except his belly or his
purse. Years ago it was said by one of themselves, 'The hell of the
English is--_not to make money_,' If the divine principle of charity is
a myth, and selfishness rages against selfishness here, much more so
with a people whose only God is Mammon. And finally, if inevitable
dissolution shall overtake us, and we rush into absolutism as a refuge
from anarchy, we shall have the melancholy pleasure--if it can be a
pleasure--of hailing the almost simultaneous wreck of the British
Constitution, whose noble ruins, no less than ours, would be mournful
monumental witnesses to the glory of ages wiser and better than our
own.
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