Religion has caused many wars and covered countless fields with dead.
Of course, all men should be temperate,—should avoid excess—should keep the golden path between extremes—should gather roses, not thorns. The only way to make men temperate is to develop the brain.
When passions and appetites are stronger than the intellect, men are savages; when the intellect governs the passions, when the passions are servants, men are civilized. The people need education—facts—philosophy. Drunkenness is one form of intemperance, prohibition is another form. Another trouble is that these little laws and ordinances can not be enforced.
Both parties want votes, and to get votes they will allow unpopular laws to sleep, neglected, and finally refuse to enforce them. These spasms of virtue, these convulsions of conscience are soon over, and then comes a long period of neglectful rest.
THE OLD AND NEW YEAR.—For countless ages the old earth has been making, in alternating light and shade, in gleam and gloom, the whirling circuit of the sun, leaving the record of its flight in many forms—in leaves of stone, in growth of tree and vine and flower, in glittering gems of many hues, in curious forms of monstrous life, in ravages of flood and flame, in fossil fragments stolen from decay by chance, in molten masses hurled from lips of fire, in gorges worn by waveless, foamless cataracts of ice, in coast lines beaten back by the imprisoned sea, in mountain ranges and in ocean reefs, in islands lifted from the underworld—in continents submerged and given back to light and life.
Another year has joined his shadowy fellows in the wide and voiceless desert of the past, where, from the eternal hour-glass forever fall the sands of time. Another year, with all its joy and grief, of birth and death, of failure and success—of love and hate. And now, the first day of the new o'er arches all. Standing between the buried and the babe, we cry, "Farewell and Hail!"—January 1,1893.
KNOWLEDGE consists in the perception of facts, their relations—conditions, modes and results of action. Experience is the foundation of knowledge—without experience it is impossible to know. It may be that experience can be transmitted—inherited. Suppose that an infinite being existed in infinite space. He being the only existence, what knowledge could he gain by experience? He could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. He would have no use for what we call the senses. Could he use what we call the faculties of the mind? He could not compare, remember, hope or fear. He could not reason. How could he know that he existed? How could he use force? There was in the universe nothing that would resist—nothing.