No man, then, we repeat it, stands more in want of a Sabbath than the atheist. No man has greater need of some such seasons in which he may perhaps find a cure for his dreadful spiritual blindness by giving himself up to all the terrific consequences of his gloomy creed. Let him devote one day in seven to the sober contemplation of a universe without a God, without a providence, without prayer, without a moral government,--religion, reverence, and worship forever dead and gone,--buried with them in their graves all that was most touching in poetry, beautiful in art, elevating in science, or sublime in philosophy,--all moral distinctions perished, of course, except those base counterfeits which resolve themselves into the pursuit of physical pleasure, or the avoidance of physical pain. Let him think of worlds on worlds teeming with life, yet all surrendered to the wheels of a blind and inexorable nature crushing on eternally with her mindless laws,--revolving in her slow but endlessly-recurring cycles,--making every seeming advance but the forerunner of the direst catastrophes of ruin,--or else in an apparent endless progression ever sacrificing individual parts and individual personalities to soulless wholes, yet furnishing to our philosophy no satisfactory ground on which to decide the question, whether the eternal drama in its most universal estimate is any more likely to be one of happiness than of intense and hopeless misery. Let the atheist, and the unbeliever who is on the road to atheism, fix his mind on thoughts like these until he begins to have some conception of what it is to be "without God and without hope in the world." Let him dwell on this sad orphanage, until in the intolerable loneliness of his spirit he is driven for shelter to the idea of a personal law-making, law-executing Deity, and is forced to admit that no doctrine of moral retribution, however stern, no creed, even of the most gloomy and fanatical religionist, ever presented so many difficulties as a rejection of those ideas on which all religion is founded.