sive free thought we are amused with the buoyant audacity of the "young idea." Yet even there we find many a passage which calls forth the sincerest sympathy. Take, for instance, the following:
This is touching enough—though perhaps the stolid aggressiveness which knows, as yet, no relentings, is really a far more tragic spectacle. But there are other lamentations, uttered of late years by distinguished atheists, which might move a heart of stone, much more should stir the energies of every Christian teacher—himself at peace—to seek by any sacrifice of his own ease or settled preconceptions an "cirenicon," a method of conciliation, an opening for a mutual confession of needless estrangement and provocation.
The most serious trial through which society can pass is encountered in the exuviation of its religious restraints.[3]
Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, ingulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and atheism overwhelming is upon us. . . . Man has become, in a new sense, the measure of the universe; and in this, the latest and most appalling of his soundings, indications are returned from the infinite voids of space and time that his intelligence, with all its noble capacities for love and adoration, is yet alone—destitute of kith or kin in all this universe of being. . . . Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the "new faith" is a desirable substitute for the waning splendor of "the old," I am not ashamed to confess that, with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness. And when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine and the lonely