in store for us than what we profess, the
blissful secret has not yet been revealed. Infidelity, often so loud
in attacking Christianity, is silent as a god of iron or brass when we
ask at its shrine. If I give up faith in Christ, what wouldest thou
have me be and do, and how live and rejoice as an immortal being?

What, then, I again ask, would be lost and gained on both sides after
the war, in the event of Christianity being destroyed? We Christians
know full well what we would gain and lose;--we know that we would
gain nothing, and lose everything! We would lose all which we
most love in the universe of God,--all which makes us rejoice in
existence,--all which enables us to look at the past, present, and
future with perfect peace; and of all men we would be most miserable!
It is true that in regard to many an object of affection, it may be
said--

"Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all!"

But not so in regard to our love of Jesus Christ. Better never to
have seen that glory filling the heavens and earth, and making life a
constant thanksgiving and praise, than, after having seen it, to be
persuaded by any witchery that it was all a dream--a fiction of the
imagination--a ghostly superstition--which it is wisdom to banish from
the memory. For once we have lost Jesus Christ as our ever-living,
ever-present, all-sufficient Friend and Saviour, what are we to do?
Can we contentedly fall back upon our own being, or upon any other
person, and live on "without Christ in the world!" Or are we in those
circumstances to be told that we may still have comfort in "religion
without the supernatural," and rejoice in "the eternal and essential
verities of morality!" Only think of it, Christians! The living man,
the light and hope of the family, is murdered; but a disciple of pure
science and calm philosophy enters it, and tells its agonised members
that it is folly and ignorance to indulge in such grief, for science
has analysed their friend, and preserved in a series of neat phials,
which they may easily carry about with them, all his constituent
elements, his "essentials," his carbon, his silica, this and that
gas--everything, in short, which made up the substance of him whom
they were accustomed to call their beloved; therefore they may
"comfort one another with these words!" And thus would the enemy of
Christianity presume to comfort us with his "essentials," when our
living Lord is gone! Comfort i