------- [WRITTEN FOR THE CONSTITUTION, 1881.] NEW YORK, January 26.—The dread of the times, as I see it, is the growing skepticism in the leading circles of thought and action throughout the country—a swelling tide of atheism and unbelief that has already swept over the outposts of religion. I am not alarmed by the fact that Henry Ward Beecher shook hands with Ingersoll on a public stand, and has since swung beyond the limit of orthodoxy, any more than I am reassured by the fact that Stephen H. Tyng has, by indorsing the miracles at Lourdes, swung back into the stronghold of superstition. These are mere personal expressions that may mean much or little. They may be classed with the complaint of Dr. Talmage that he found religion dead in a circuit of 3000 miles of travel last year, which complaint is balanced by the assertion of Dr. Hall that the growth of religious sentiment was never so decisive as at present. I have noted, in the first place, that the latter-day writers—novelists, scientists and essayists—are arraying themselves in great force either openly on the side of skepticism, or are treating religious sentiment with a readiness of touch and lack of reverence, that is hardly less dangerous. I need not run over the lists of scientists, beginning with Tyndall, Huxley and Stephens, that have raised the banner of negation—nor recount the number of novelists who follow the lead of sweet George Eliot, this sad and gentle woman, who allied sentiment to positivism so subtly, and who died with the promise on her lips that her life would “be gathered like a scroll in the tomb, unread forever”—who said that she “wanted no future that broke the ties of the past,” and has gone to meet the God whose existence she denied. We all know that within the past twenty years there has been an alarming increase of atheism among the leading writers in all branches. But it is the growth of skepticism among the people that has astonished me. I am not misled by the superb eloquence of Ingersoll nor the noisy blasphemy of his imitators. I was with five journalists, and I found that every one of them were skeptics, two of them in the most emphatic sense. In a sleeping-car with eight passengers, average people I take it, I found that three were confirmed atheists, three were doubtful about it, and two were old-fashioned Christians. A young friend of mine, a journalist and lecturer, asked me a few months ago what I thought of his preparing a lecture that would outdo Ingersoll—his excuse being that he found Ingersoll so popular. I asked Henry Watterson once what effect Ingersoll’s lectures had on the Louisville public. “No more than a theatrical representation,” was the quick reply. Watterson was wrong. I have never seen a man who came away from an Ingersoll lecture as stout of faith and as strong in heart as he was when he went there.