knew, was one who sent his children to a convent for their education. “I cannot lift the blight of unbelief from my own mind,” he said, “but it shall never fall upon the minds of my children if I can help it. As for me, I would give all I have on earth for the old faith that I wore so lightly and threw off so carelessly.” The practical effects of the growth of atheism are too terrible to contemplate. A vessel on an unknown sea that has lost its rudder and is tossed in a storm—that’s the picture. It will not do for Mr. Ingersoll to say that a purely human code of right and wrong can be established to which the passions of men can be anchored and from which they can swing with safety. It will not do for him to cite his own correct life or the correct lives of the skeptical scientists, or of leading skeptics, as proof that unbelief does not bring license. These men are held to decency by a pride of position and by a sense of special responsibility. It is the masses that atheism will demoralize and debauch. It is thousands of simple men and women, who, loosed of the one restraint that is absolute and imperious, will drift upon the current of their passions, colliding everywhere, and bringing confusion and ruin. The vastly greatest influence that religion has exercised, as far as the world goes, has been the conservative pressure that it has put upon the bulk of the people, who are outside of the church. With the pressure barely felt and still less acknowledged, it has preserved the integrity of society, kept the dangerous instincts within bounds, repressed savagery, and held the balance. Conscience has dominated men who never confessed even to themselves its power, and the dim, religious memories of childhood, breathing imperceptibly over long wastes of sin and brutality, have dissolved clouds of passion in the souls of veterans. Atheism will not work its full effect on this class of men. Even after they have murdered conscience by withholding the breath upon which it lives, its ghost will grope through the chambers of their brain, menacing and terrible, and to the last,— Creeping on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear! It is on the young men and women—the generation bred in the chill atmosphere of unbelief—that atheism will do its worst. With no traditions in which to guide their faith, no altar before which they can do reverence, no ideal to which their eyes can turn, no standard lofty enough to satisfy, or steadfast enough to assure—with no uplifting that is not limited, no aspiration that has wings, and no enthusiasm that is not absurd—with life but a fever that kindles in the cradle and dies in the grave,—truly atheism meets youth with a dread prospect, sullen, storm-swept, hopeless.