nature. Why do they ask us
to ignore the most striking fact of human nature, that man, even if he
were a mere animal, is alone of all animals--a praying animal? Is that
strange instinct of worship, which rises in the heart of man as soon as
he begins to think, to become a civilized being and not a savage, to be
disregarded as a childish dream when he rises to a higher civilization
still? Is the experience of men, heathen as well as Christian, for all
these ages to go for nought? Has it mattered nought whether men cried to
Baal or to God; for with both alike there has been neither sound nor
voice, nor any that answered? Has every utterance that has ever gone up
from suffering and doubting humanity, gone up in vain? Have the prayers
of saints, the hymns of psalmists, the agonies of martyrs, the
aspirations of poets, the thoughts of sages, the cries of the oppressed,
the pleadings of the mother for her child, the maiden praying in her
chamber for her lover upon the distant battle-field, the soldier
answering her prayer from afar off with, "Sleep quiet, I am in God's
hands"--those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most noble,
most pure, most beautiful, most divine, been all in vain?--impertinences;
the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into nowhere, to no thing, and
in vain? Has every suffering, searching soul which ever gazed up into
the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even a glimpse of a
divine eye, beholding all, and ordering all, and pitying all, gazed up in
vain? For at the ground of the universe is "_not a divine eye_, _but
only a blank bottomless eye-socket_;" {39} and man has no Father in
heaven; and Christ revealed Him not, because He was not there to reveal;
and there was no hope, no remedy, no deliverance, for the miserable among
the sons of men?

Oh, my friends, those who believe, or fancy that they believe such
things, must be able to do so only through some peculiar conformation
either of brain or heart. Only want of imagination to conceive the
consequences of such doctrines can enable them, if they have any love and
pity for their fellow-men, to preach those doctrines without pity and
horror. They know not, they know not, of what they rob a mankind already
but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin; a mankind which, if
it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly--as Homer said of
old--more miserable than the beasts of the field. If their unconscious
conce