The ancient creeds have grown absurd. The miracles are small and mean. The inspired book is filled with fables told to please a childish world, and the dogma of eternal pain now shocks the heart and brain.
He lived to see a monument unveiled to Bruno in the city of Rome—to Giordano Bruno—that great man who two hundred and eighty-nine years ago suffered death for having proclaimed the truths that since have filled the world with joy. He lived to see the victim of the church a victor—lived to see his memory honored by a nation freed from papal chains.
He worked knowing what the end must be—expecting little while he lived—but knowing that every fact in the wide universe was on his side. He knew that truth can wait, and so he worked patient as eternity.
He had the brain of a philosopher and the heart of a child.
Horace Seaver was a man of common sense.
By that I mean, one who knows the law of average. He denied the Bible, not on account of what has been discovered in astronomy, or the length of time it took to form the delta of the Nile—but he compared the things he found with what he knew.
He knew that antiquity added nothing to probability—that lapse of time can never take the place of cause, and that the dust can never gather thick enough upon mistakes to make them equal with the truth.
He knew that the old, by no possibility, could have been more wonderful than the new, and that the present is a perpetual torch by which we know the past.
To him all miracles were mistakes, whose parents were cunning and credulity. He knew that miracles were not, because they are not.
He believed in the sublime, unbroken, and eternal march of causes and effects—denying the chaos of chance, and the caprice of power.