sponse to his prayers but the echo of his own voice. He
therefore bids the gods adieu, and sets himself to the task of making
the best of life for himself and his fellows. Without false hopes, or
bare fears, he steers his course over the ocean of life, and says with
the poet, "I am the captain of my soul."

ATHEISM AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. *

* July, 1889.

Sunday, July 14, is the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille, and the occasion will be splendidly celebrated at Paris.
In itself the capture of this prison-fortress by the people was not a
wonderful achievement; it was ill-defended, and its governor might, had
he chosen, have exploded the powder magazine and blown it sky-high. But
the event was the parting of the ways. It showed that the multitude had
got the bit between its teeth, and needed a more potent master than the
poor king at Versailles. And the event itself was a striking one. Men
are led by imagination, and the Bastille was the symbol of centuries
of oppression. Within its gloomy dungeons hundreds of innocent men had
perished in solitary misery, without indictment or trial, consigned to
death-in-life by the arbitrary order of irresponsible power. Men of the
most eminent intellect and character had suffered within its precincts
for the crime of teaching new truth or exposing old superstitions.
Voltaire himself had twice tasted imprisonment there. What wonder, then,
that the people fixed their gaze upon it on that ominous fourteenth of
July, and attacked it as the very citadel of tyranny? The Bastille fell,
and the sound re-echoed through Europe. It was the signal of a new era
and a new hope. The Revolution had begun--that mighty movement which, in
its meaning and consequences, dwarfs every other cataclysm in history.

But revolutions do not happen miraculously. Their advent is prepared.
They are as much _caused_ as the fall of a ripe apple from the tree,
or the regular bursting of the buds in spring. The authors of the
Revolution were in their graves. Its leaders, or its instruments,
appeared upon the scene in '89. After life's fitful fever Voltaire was
sleeping well. Rousseau's tortured heart was at rest. Diderot's colossal
labors were ended; his epitaph was written, and the great Encyclopaedia
remained as his living monument. D'Holbach had just joined his friends
in their eternal repose. A host of smaller men, also, but admirable
soldiers of progress in their degree, had passe