If men should be convinced that they are only animals, and that God takes no notice of them, whose property would be safe? Whose life would be sacred? Who would be secure from the unrestrained ravages of every base passion that finds its home in the human heart? When Christ, as a Divine Being, or as a man divinely commissioned, dies out of the popular faith, what then? Who shall comfort the hearts that mourn? Who shall assure us that virtue has a reward, or that there is any such thing as virtue? Who shall stimulate the love of brotherhood, and move men to works of benevolence? Who then would strive to raise the world out of its beastly degradation? No candid observer will deny that whatever of good there is in our civilization is the product of the gospel. The very government under which we live was organized and established by men who were the instruments of God. That which gives us protection by day and night--the dwellings we live in, the clothes we wear, the institutions of mental, social and moral culture--all these are the direct results of the revelations of God. A faith in God is the very fountain head of everything that is desirable in our civilization, and this civilization is the flower of time. Humanity has reached its noblest thrift, its highwater mark, its loftiest flight of excellence through the influence of this faith. {215} And now we are told by infidels, in the most complacent language that the gospel is a myth, and that the Old Testament, which holds a relation to the New Testament and all other divine records as the blade holds to the ear, the bud to the flower, is a huge batch of absurdities with no valid claim to our respectful faith. We are told in effect that out of an ingenious lie, out of a cunning delusion, out of a baseless myth, out of a systematized falsehood has sprung all that there is in this life worth living for--the grandest motive of human progress in purity and power! We are, in effect, told that by means of a stupendous cheat, men are trained to goodness, purified of their passions, filled with love to one another, prompted to the highest heroism, inspired to sacrifices of life and fortune for the public good, and are built up into a civilization which is immeasurably superior to all that human nature, assisted merely by human reason and false religion, ever dreamed of! We are, in effect, told all this; and we now ask reasonable men what they think of it. Who are the credulous men--those who believe in a divine power and personage, out of whose life has flown into humanity those pure principles and elevating and purifying motives--or those who believe that a lie has wrought those marvels? Of all the credulous idiots that the age has produced, we know of none so pitiable as those who, in the full blaze of such a civilization as ours, soberly talk of the gospel as a myth and its Author as a cheat. {216} CONCLUSION.