Give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard’s liners and the electric telegraph, are to me… signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe.

Kingsley contrasts traditional, miracle-centered piety (“saints and virgins, relics and miracles”) with the practical, reformist energies of the modern age: political economy, public health, engineering, and the emblematic technologies of industrial modernity (the spinning-jenny, railways, transatlantic steamships, the telegraph). The thrust is not simple materialism but a moral-theological claim: that human ingenuity and social reform can be read as evidence of alignment with a rational, law-governed creation. In this view, progress in industry and sanitation becomes a kind of providential sign—an arena where ethical responsibility and scientific understanding cooperate with the universe’s order, rather than competing with faith.