ct as the heathen of India. They have every variety of oracles, and
conjectures, and suppositions about the other world; but for their
guesses they offer no proof. When they give us their oracles as if they
were known truths, we are compelled to ask, How do you know? The only
thing in which they are agreed among themselves is in denying the
resurrection of the body; a point which they gathered from their heathen
classics. A poor, empty, naked, shivering, table-rapping spirit, obliged
to fly over the world at the sigh of any silly sewing girl, or the
bidding of some brazen-faced strumpet, is all that ever shall exist of
Washington, or Newton, in the scheme of one class of Bible rejectors. To
obtain rest from such a doom, others fly to the eternal tomb, and inform
us that the soul is simply an acting of the brain, and when the brain
ceases to act, the soul ceases also. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die. But even this hog philosophy is reasonable, compared with the
dogma of the large majority, that a man may blaspheme, swear, lie,
steal, murder, and commit adultery, and go straight to heaven--that
"many a swarthy Indian who bowed down to wood and stone--many a
grim-faced Calmuck who worshiped the great god of storms--many a Grecian
peasant who did homage to Phoebus Apollo when the sun rose or went
down--many a savage, his hands smeared all over with human
sacrifice--shall sit down with Moses and Jesus in the kingdom of
God."[56] To such wild unreason does the mind of man descend when it
rejects the Bible.

Life and immortality are brought to light by the gospel. Where there is
no vision, hope perishes. The only plausible creed for him who rejects
it is the eternal tomb, and the heart-chilling inscription: "Death is an
eternal sleep!"

_Without a revelation from God, men are as ignorant how to live, as how
to die._ They have no rule of life having either truth or authority to
direct them. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, of the purity of whose blood we
are so proud, trusted to their magical incantations for the cure of
diseases, for the success of their tillage, for the discovery of lost
property, for uncharming cattle and the prevention of casualties. One
day was useful for all things; another, though good to tame animals, was
baleful to sow seed. One day was favorable to the commencement of
business, another to let blood, and others wore a forbidding aspect to
these and other things. On this day they were to buy, on a