of wisdom.  Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of Nature or of chance; her pride is in the use.  The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly suited to a man who has long views,—­who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are accomplished.  He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations as those which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.  On the view of this subject, a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind.  To destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material.  It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism.  These energies always existed in Nature, and they were always discernible.  They seemed, some of them unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children,—­until contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents, in subservience to the great views and designs of men.  Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and whose bodily labor you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield?  Had you no way of using the men, but by converting monks into pensioners?  Had you no way of turning the revenue to account, but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale?  If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its natural course.  Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore they sell their tools.

But the institutions savor of superstition in their very principle; and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence.—­This I do not mean to dispute; but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage.  You derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color, in the moral eye, as superstition itself.  It was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion, as in all the passions.  But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices?  In its possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil.  It is, however, a moral subject, and of course admits of all degrees and all modifications.  Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they