, yet people in general regard them as fools;
and they themselves can see that their fancied wisdom does not prove
their friend.

They can give no explanation of the mysteries of the universe. They
cannot account for the facts which geology reveals with regard to the
natural history of the globe. They cannot account for the mechanism of
the heavens, or the chemistry of the earth. They cannot account for
life, organization, or intelligence. They cannot account for instinct.
They cannot account for the marks of design which are everywhere visible
in Nature, nor for the numberless wonders of special arrangement and
adaptation manifest in her works. They cannot account for the difference
between man and the lower animals. Animals can indulge themselves freely
and take no harm; man cannot indulge himself freely without misery and
ruin. Animals can be happy without self-denial; man cannot. Man excels
in the gift of reason, yet commits mistakes, and perpetrates crimes,
which we look for in vain among the beasts of the field. Man, with a
thousand times more power than the brutes, and with immensely greater
capacities and opportunities for happiness, is frequently the most
miserable being on earth. On the supposition that man was made for a
different end, and endowed with a different nature from the brutes--on
the supposition that man was made for virtue, for piety, for rational,
religious self-government, for voluntary obedience to God, for the joy
of a good conscience, for heaven--in a word, on the supposition that the
Scriptural and Christian doctrine about man is true, all this is
explained; but on the infidel theory all is a torturing, maddening
mystery.

And let infidels do what they will, and say what they please, the world
at large will hold to the religious theory. Mahometans, Pagans, and
Christians all insist that man is made for higher work, and meant for a
higher destiny, than the lower animals. The Christian theory is accepted
by the highest of our race. They regard it with the deepest reverence.
The books that unfold it they regard as divine. They read them in their
families. They read them in their temples. They teach them in their
schools. They publish them in every language; they send them round the
globe. In England and America, the first of the nations, you see them
everywhere. You meet with them in hotels, in boarding-houses, at railway
stations, and on steam packets; in asylums and infirmaries; in barracks