d, I
might say, the most discouraging and threatening symptom, in the eyes
of those who desire the progress of their race, who aspire to the
moral perfection of the human spirit, who hope in Republican
institutions, who love the People, who wish to cultivate their reason,
who desire that the People should understand themselves, respect
themselves, and, finally, by their enlightenment, their
conscientiousness, their moderation and virtue, give the lie to those
who declare them in a state of perpetual infancy, perpetual madness,
or perpetual weakness?

Yes, this is but too true: men have been blotting out God, for a
century past, from the souls of the People, and more especially in
latter years. The masses have been driven to Atheism, they have been
driven on every side and by every hand.

Sometimes, by blasphemies, such as were never heard upon the earth,
until an insult to the Creator became a means of popularity among His
creatures; blasphemies which would have darkened the sun and
extinguished the stars, if God had not commanded His creation to pass
unnoticed the revolt of a blind and foolish insect against Infinity,
and refused Himself to sink to the foolishness of avenging impiety!
Read those lines which I dare not write, those lines where an apostle
of Atheism effaces the name of God from the beautiful creation and
endeavors to substitute his own! * * *

VIII.

Sometimes the masses have been driven to Atheism by science. There are
some geometers great in paradox, men who, of all the senses that the
Creator has given to his creatures, have cultivated only one, the
sense of touch,--leaving out entirely that chief sense, which connects
and confirms all others,--_the sense of the invisible_, the _moral
sense_. These _savans_, geometers, physicians, arithmeticians,
mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, measurers of distances,
calculators of numbers, have early acquired the habit of believing
only in the _tangible_. These are the beings who, so to speak, live
and think in the dark; all, which is not palpable, does not exist for
them. They measure the earth, and say, "We have not met God in any
league of its surface!" They heat the alembic, and say, "We have not
perceived God in the smoke of any of our experiments!" They dissect
dead bodies, and say, "We have not found God, or thought, in any
bundle of muscles or nerves in our dissection!" They calculate columns
of figures, long as the firmament, and say, "