t for their courageous
sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if
superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no
little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert
Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them
merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both
of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent--that they
confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one
religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred
book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the
letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem
to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or
"the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was
no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away
the mysterious religious sense in man--however, or wherever expressed.
Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo
idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport
between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious
sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by
what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence.

One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse,
though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew
Arnold:

What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
What bard,
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt
When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?
Can rise and obey
The beck of the Spirit like him.

Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a
hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae
and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that
needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you
remember, that of Browning's _Sordello_--

one eye
In all Ve