634 "^HE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sive free thought we are amused with the buoyant audacity of the 

 " young idea." Yet even there we find many a passage which calls 

 forth the sincerest sympathy. Take, for instance, the following : 



Tliere are few reflective persons who have not been, now and again, impressed 

 with awe as they looked back on the past of humanity. ... It is then tliat we 

 see the grandest illustrations of that unending necessity under which, it would 

 seem, man labors, the necessity of abandoning ever and again the heritage of his 

 fathers, ... of continually leaving behind him the citadel of faith and peace, 

 raised by the piety of the past, for an atmosphere of tumult and denial. . . . 

 Whatever may be our present conclusions about Christianity, we can not too 

 often remember that it has been one of the most important factors in the life of 

 mankind." ' 



This is touching enough — though perhaps the stolid aggressiveness 

 which knows, as yet, no relentings, is really a far more tragic spectacle. 

 But there are other lamentations, uttered of late years by distinguished 

 atheists, which might move a heart of stone, much more should stir the 

 energies of every Christian teacher — himself at peace — to seek by any 

 sacrifice of his own ease or settled preconceptions an " eirenicon," a 

 method of conciliation, an opening for a mutual confession of needless 

 estrangement and provocation. 



Does that new philosophy of history which destroys the Christian philosophy 

 of it afford an adequate basis for such a reconstruction of the ideal as is required ? 

 Candidly we must rejjly, " Not yet." . . . Very far are we from being the iirst 

 who have experienced the agony of discovered delusion. . . . Well may despair 

 almost seize on one who has been, not in name only, but in very truth, a Chris- 

 tian, when that incarnation which had given him in Christ an ever-living brother 

 and friend is found to be but an old myth [of Osiris] with a new life in it.' 



The most serious trial throngh which society can pass is encountered in the 

 exuviation of its religious restraints.^ 



Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as 

 that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with de- 

 struction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, ingulfing our 

 most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. The 

 flood-gates of infidelity are open, and atheism overwhelming is upon us. . . . 

 Man has become, in a new sense, the measure of the universe ; and in this, the 

 latest and most appalling of his soundings, indications are returned from the 

 infinite voids of space and time that his intelligence, with all its noble capacities 

 for love and adoration, is yet alone — destitute of kith or kin in all this universe 

 of being. . . . Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who 

 affirm that the twilight doctrine of the "new faith " is a desirable substitute for 

 the waning splendor of "the old," I am not ashamed to confess tljat, with this 

 virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness. And 

 when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast 

 between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine and the lonely 



' Bradlaugh's "National Reformer," October 6, 18T8. 



= Stuart Glennie, "In the Morning Land" (1873), pp. 29, 378, 431. 



2 Draper, "Religion and Science" (eleventh edition, 1878), p. 328. 



