which will not float
me across the dark river. If Infidels intend to convert the world, they
must give us some positive system of truth which we can believe, and
venerate, and trust.

A glimmering idea of this necessity seems lately to have dawned upon
some of them. It is quite possible that they have also felt the want of
something for their own souls to believe; for an Infidel has a soul, a
poor, hungry, starved soul, just like other men. At any rate, having
grown tired of pelting the Church with the dirtballs of Voltaire and
Paine, they begin to acknowledge that it is, after all, an institution;
and that the Bible is an influential book, both popular and useful in
its way. Mankind, it seems, will have a Church and a Bible of some sort;
why not go to work and make a Church and a Bible of their own?
Accordingly they have gone to work, and in a very short time have
prepared a variety of ungodly religions, so various that the
worldly-minded man who can not be suited with one to his taste must be
very hard to please. Discordant and contradictory in their positive
statements, they are agreed only in negatives; denying the God of the
Bible, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment to come. Nevertheless
each discoverer or constructor presents his system to the world with
great confidence, large claims to superior benevolence, vast pretensions
to learning and science, and no little cant about duty and piety.
Wonderful to tell, some of them are very fond of clothing their
ungodliness in the language of Scripture.

No pains are spared to secure the wide spread of these notions.
Prominent Infidels are invited to deliver courses of scientific
lectures, in which the science is made the medium of conveying the
Infidelity. Scientific books, novels, magazines, daily newspapers, and
common school books, are all enlisted in the work. The disciples of
Infidelity are numerous and zealous. It would be hard to find a factory,
boarding-house, steamboat or hotel where twelve persons are employed,
without an Infidel; and harder still to find an Infidel who will not use
his influence to poison his associates.

These systems are well adapted to the depraved tastes of the age. The
business man, whose whole soul is set on money-making and spending, is
right glad to meet the Secularist, who will prove to him on scientific
principles, that a man is much profited by gaining the whole world, even
at the risk of his soul, if he has such a thing.