People who live in the country know what is meant by a “blight”--a thing which is neither mist nor storm, neither cloud nor rain,--a fever of the atmosphere, without any freshening or cleansing force in its composition. Like a dull stretch of smoky fog, it hangs for hours and often for days over the face of the landscape, poisoning the wholesome fruit and grain in the orchards and fields, and leaving trails of noxious insect pests behind it upon trees and flowers, withering their foliage, and blackening all buds of promise with a destroying canker to their very core. It is a suffocating, malodorous miasma, clinging to the air, for which there is no remedy but a strong, ay, even a tempestuous wind,--a wind which vigorously pierces through the humid vapour and disperses it, tearing it to shreds, and finally working up such a storm as shall drown it out of existence in torrents of purifying rain. Then all nature is relieved,--the air is cleared,--health and gladness re-assert their beneficent influences, and the land lies open to renewed life and easy breathing once more. Even as “blight” is known in things natural, so is it known and easily recognizable in things moral and social. It occurs periodically and with more or less regularity, between certain changing, and not always progressive phases or epochs of human civilization. It visited Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon; it loomed over Nineveh and Babylon,--and in our day it is steadily spreading its pall over Europe and America. Its gloom is heavy and pronounced,--it would seem to be darkening into the true sable or death colour, for there is no light of faith to illumine it. It is the outcome of the infected breath of peoples who are deliberately setting God aside out of their countings, and living for Self and the Hour alone. So-called “scientists,” scraping at the crust-covering of the mine of knowledge, and learning of its hidden treasure about as much as might be measured with a finger-nail, have boldly asserted that there is no God, no Supreme Intelligent Force back of the universe,--no future life,--nothing but death and destruction for the aspiring, fighting, working human soul,--and that, therefore, having been created out of caprice, a “sport” of chance and the elements, and having nothing to exist for but to make chance and the elements as agreeable as possible during his brief conscious experience of them, the best thing for man to do is to “eat, drink, and be merry all the days of his life,” though even this, according to Solomon, is “also vanity.” For of eating comes indigestion, of drink stupefaction, and of merriment satiety. Strange it is that if there is no higher destiny for man than this world and its uses, he should always be thrown back upon himself dissatisfied! Give him millions of money, and when he has them, he cares little for what they can bring; grant him unlimited power and a few years suffice to weary him of its use.