Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place,
(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings, athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fringed lids and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious Sun in heaven,
Cries out: "Where is it?"—Coleridge.
he laugh of the foolish infidel and the sneer of the solemn atheist are abroad in the land. The awful draught they hold to the lips of humanity is well honeyed with some of the adjuncts of religion itself, else the perilous cup would be rejected. Let us see how the atheist secures his victim, for he is never content to enjoy alone the extravagances of his folly. I have noticed that when a Democratic editor receives dispatches containing news of a Republican victory, he is frequently expert enough in the guile pertaining to his profession to put a displayed heading on those same dispatches which clearly saves the day for the Democrats—or vice versa. And I have also noticed that it takes true mental pluck to rightly scan, first, that rooster of roosters (invented during the last few years), then the ten lines of Democratic Io Paians which follow, and lastly, the small type containing the real facts.
MAN IS SO MUCH LIKE A FISH
that certain bait is sure to catch him. The morning after the election the most astute Republican or Democrat in the country trembles before the terrors of a ten-line Democratic or Republican displayed heading, as the case may be. Now the crafty atheist has a way of laying down fallacies which often terrifies one into involuntarily believing that those fallacies are facts, until one stops to think that the atheist is but a man, after all, and that there is an appeal from his findings. It is, therefore, in the defense of humanity that I advance against him,
HOPING TO HIT HIM BECAUSE HE IS SO BIG,
and to escape his blows because I am so small. "What though the day be lost, all is not lost!" Though man have glaring faults, he is still a problem far beyond the fiat of any atheist. He still has a destiny. The atheist lays down dogma after dogma. In this changing world, where even the little balance-wheel of a watch must be "compensated," it is clearly as impossible for any atheist to lay down an undeviating dogma as it was for the Cretan to truly say that all Cretans were liars! "Broadly, an unselfish deed is impossible. There never was a human thought that reached beyond the human body." Let us capture those two atheistic dogmas and take off their displayed headings.
AWAY BACK ON THE PLAINS OF CHALDÆA,
in the youth of the world, there lived men who watched their flocks by day and the hosts of heaven by night. Their study of the heavens lifted them out of themselves, in my belief, and their observations of celestial phenomena led them to the discovery of the fact that eclipses of the great heavenly lights happened in a regular rotation of eighteen years and ten days. This discovery has been very useful in purging the idolatry from eclipses—as, had it not been for the Chaldæans, perhaps the mother of the atheist might have offered him as an oblation in
THE FIRST TOTAL ECLIPSE