e shall ask the Father in my name, he
will give it you;" and he proves himself to be the Redeemer, through signs
and wonders, and refers to the greatest sign which was to be manifested in
him--the sign of the resurrection.

The other reason for entering upon the discussion of these questions, lies
in the incredible thoughtlessness with which a great part of modern
educated people, even of such men as do not at all wish to abandon faith in
a living God, permit themselves to be governed by the leaders of religious
infidelity, and to be defiled and robbed of everything, which belongs to
the nature of a living God. By many, it is considered as good taste, and as
an indispensable sign of deep scientific learning and high education, and
it forms a seldom contested part of correspondence in newspapers, which
have for their public a wide circle of educated people, that in referring
to the inviolableness of the laws of nature they declare faith in a special
providence of God to be a view long ago rejected, and which is only
consistent with half-civilized individuals; that they look down with a
compassionate and self-conscious smile upon the egoistic implicit faith of
congregations who still pray for good harvest-weather, and see in the
damage done by a hailstorm a divine affliction; that they criticise it as a
sad token of ecclesiastical darkness, when even church-authorities order
such prayers in case of wide-spread calamities; that they fall into a
passion over the {347} narrowness and the dulling influence of pedagogues
who see in the histories which they relate to their pupils or put into
their hands for reading, the government of an ethical order of the world
which goes a little farther than the rule that he who deceives injures his
good name, and he who gets intoxicated injures his health; that they give a
man who still believes in the resurrection of Jesus, to understand that he
has not yet learned the first elements of the theory of putrefaction and
perishableness. That the adversaries of faith in a God thus express
themselves, and try to conquer as much ground as possible for their frosty
doctrine, is certainly quite natural; but that even advocates of theism
should permit such stuff to be presented to them, and can keep silent in
regard to it--nay, that even preachers offer it to their congregations as
ordinary Sabbath edification, and that their hearers can gratefully accept
it--is certainly a suggestive and alarming ev