a faithful servant of that Power, and asking daily for its
interposition for promotion of a highly moral purpose, why should he not
have expected his favor to the enterprise? To expect that was, in
Mr. Sheldon, natural, reasonable, wise; his folly lay in believing in
conditions making it expectable. A person convinced that the law of
gravitation is suspended is no fool for walking into a bog. Mr. Harvey
may understand, but Mr. Sheldon can not understand, that Jesus Christ
would not edit a newspaper at all.

The religious mind, it should be understood, is not logical. It may
acquire, as Whateley's did, a certain familiarity with the syllogism as
an abstraction, but of the syllogism's practical application, its
real relation to the phenomena of thought, the religious mind can know
nothing. That is merely to say that the mind congenitally gifted with
the power of logic and accessible to its light and leading does not take
to religion, which is a matter, not of reason, but of feeling--not of
the head, but of the heart. Religions are conclusions for which the
facts of nature supply no major premises. They are accepted or rejected
according to the original mental make-up of the person to whom they
appeal for recognition. Believers and unbelievers are like two boys
quarreling across a wall. Each got to his place by means of a ladder.
They may fight if they will, but neither can kick away the other's
support.

Believing the things that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was entirely right
in thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvation
of souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the main
purpose, not only of a newspaper, but of everything that has a purpose,
or can be given one. If we have immortal souls and the consequences of
our deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world,
determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, that is the
most momentous fact conceivable. It is the only momentous fact; all
others are chaff and rags. A man who, believing it to be a fact, does
not make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul and the souls
of others that are willing to be saved is a fool and a rogue. If he
think that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning a
newspaper into a gruelpot he ought to do so or (preferably) perish in
the attempt.

The talk of degrading the sacred name, and all that, is mostly nonsense.
If one may not test his conduct in