Take the man who calls himself the liberal or free-thinking Christian. We have no objection to the title, or want of charity toward him who assumes it. He needs a Sabbath for intense thought, not so much on the argumentative evidence of particular dogmas, as on the great yet simple questions, whether the liberality of his opinions, and the few difficulties they present to his own mind, may not be evidence of their having no foundation in any wide system of eternal truth,--whether a religious creed that has no profound awe for the soul, no fearful apprehensions, no deep moral anxieties, no absorbing interest in a life to come, does not, from the very fact of such deficiency, prove itself a contradiction and a lie. So too the man who is but beginning to doubt the full inspiration of the Scriptures needs a period of most earnest meditation on the risk he may be running of giving up an only guide, whose place can never be made good by any thing in nature, philosophy, or science. The professed infidel needs a Sabbath, an oft-recurring Sabbath, of serious thought on that question of questions--Has God indeed ever spoken to man, or spoken at all, except through physical laws?--Has the awful stillness of nature been ever broken by a true voice from a true supernatural world?--And the atheist, too,--has he no need of a Sabbath, a frequent day of thought and thoughtfulness, in which he may call up and spread before his mind, in all their fearful importance, the sombre articles of his own dark creed? For creed indeed he has, unsurpassed in solemnity by that of any religionist. It has been quite common to deny the possibility of atheism, but the history of the world and of the church is showing that it is the only legitimate antagonism to a true belief in positive revelation. The shallow sciolist may not perceive it, and yet this is the dark conclusion in which some of his favorite speculations must inevitably terminate. There is no man, therefore, who has a stronger demand upon our most tender charity than the atheist. No belief presents greater difficulties, and yet there is no one to which the thinking mind is more strongly impelled, when it has once learned to distrust the lamp of revelation, and to see only shadows and spectres in that "_light shining in a dark place_, and to which we do well to take heed, until the day dawn and the eternal day star arise in our souls."