God deliver us from the fools who seek to build their paradise on the ashes of those they have destroyed. God deliver us from the fools whose life work is to cast aspersions upon the motives and characters of the leaders of men. I believe the men who reach high places in politics are, as a rule, the best and brainiest men in the land, and upon their shoulders rest the safety and well-being of the peace-loving, God-fearing millions.
I believe the world is better to-day than it ever was before. I believe the refinements of modern society, its elegant accomplishments, its intellectual culture, and its conceptions of the beautiful, are glorious evidences of our advancement toward a higher plane of being.
I think the superb churches of to-day, with the glorious harmonies of their choral music, their great pipe organs, their violins and cornets, and their grand sermons, full of heaven's balm for aching hearts, are expressions of the highest civilization that has ever dawned upon the earth. I believe each successive civilization is better, and higher, and grander, than that which preceded it; and upon the shining rungs of this ladder of evolution, our race will finally climb back to the Paradise that was lost. I believe that the society of to-day is better than it ever was before. I believe that human government is better, and nobler, and purer, than it ever was before. I believe the Church is stronger and is making grander strides toward the conversion of the world and the final establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, than it ever made before.
I believe that the biggest fools in this world are the advocates and disseminators of infidelity, the would-be destroyers of the Paradise of God.
A BLOTTED PICTURE.
I sat in a great theatre at the National Capital. It was thronged with youth, and beauty, old age, and wisdom. I saw a man, the image of his God, stand upon the stage, and I heard him speak. His gestures were the perfection of grace; his voice was music, and his language was more beautiful than I had ever heard from mortal lips. He painted picture after picture of the pleasures, and joys, and sympathies, of home. He enthroned love and preached the gospel of humanity like an angel. Then I saw him dip his brush in ink, and blot out the beautiful picture he had painted. I saw him stab love dead at his feet. I saw him blot out the stars and the sun, and leave humanity and the universe in eternal darkness, and eternal death. I saw him like the Serpent of old, worm himself into the paradise of human hearts, and by his seductive eloquence and the subtle devices of his sophistry, inject his fatal venom, under whose blight its flowers faded, its music
was hushed, its sunshine was darkened, and the soul was left a desert waste, with only the new made graves of faith and hope. I saw him, like a lawless, erratic meteor without an orbit, sweep across the intellectual sky, brilliant only in his self-consuming fire, generated by friction with the indestructible and eternal truths of God.