173 
character would warrant, and others to err on the other 
side by too great a fear of the mischief which the tone of 
its teachings with regard to religion will warrant. I do 
not partake of either the admiration or the fears ; and, after 
the full discussion of its bearings on religion in vai’ious jour- 
nals and reviews, entered into by men far more competent for 
the task than I can pretend to be, I may well decline the 
office of pursuing the subject farther, especially in an Address 
which has already taxed your time and patience rather 
severely. 
I have been obliged to take you with me through the dark 
and dreary places occupied by the philosophical atheism 
of this boasted age of intellect and light. In the last 
writings of Mill I have introduced you to his pretended 
philosophical ideas about the being of a God, and the 
existence of a revelation as from Him, which, in accuracy, 
are, in my opinion, far behind those of the Greeks and 
Romans a little before the Christian era. Groping as they 
did in the dark, and impossible as they found it altogether to 
sever the notion of the Creator from the matter which He has 
created, (for Pantheism in some shape or other pervades nearly 
all their systems), they were rarely guilty of the unpardonable 
error of speculating on the existence of a supreme God of limited 
power. The notion is metaphysically impossible, and we may 
well believe, both from Milks admissions and his non-admissions, 
that in his latter days his keen, incisive, logical intellect was 
dulled. Assuming the fact of Omnipotence in the Deity (which 
lie will not grant), his admissions give us, unless the whole be 
written with grim irony, almost all which we Christians can 
desire, that is, the probability of a revelation from God, which 
of course includes supernaturalism, and the probability also 
of miraculous intervention. With regard to Strauss, I consider 
the melancholy exhibition of some of his latest thoughts which 
I have read to you, as the reductio ad absurclum proof of almost 
all Avhicli we contend for. He has for many years been descend- 
ing from one platform of semibelief and rationalistic doubt to 
one still lower, till he has lost all religion, and coolly discusses 
the question, “ Are we yet Christians ? ” by trying to persuade 
us that there is neither God nor immortality. Pew even of the 
illuminati among our men of science who are engaging them- 
selves, each from his own point of view, in the propagandise! 
of unbelief or the establishment of something else which they 
call religion, will follow Strauss to this lowest depth, and his 
example may, under the blessing of God, act as a warning 
rather than an encouragement. 
