Charles Dickens, whose genius will be a perpetual shield, saving thousands and millions of children from blows, who did more to make us tender with children than any other writer that ever touched a pen--he is there with the rest, according to our Christian religion. A little while ago there died in this country a philosopher--Ralph Waldo Emerson--a man of the loftiest ideal, a perfect model of integrity, whose mind was like a placid lake and reflected truths like stars. If the Christian religion be true, he is in perdition today. And yet he sowed the seeds of thought, and raised the whole world intellectually. And Longfellow, whose poems, tender as the dawn, have gone into millions of homes, not an impure, not a stained word in them all; but he was not a Christian. He did not believe in the "tidings of great joy." He didn't believe that God so loved the world that He intended to damn most everybody. And now he has gone to his reward. And Charles Darwin--a child of nature--one who knew more about his mother than any other child she ever had. What is philosophy? It is to account for phenomena by which we are surrounded--that is, to find the hidden cord that unites everything. Charles Darwin threw more light upon the problem of human existence than all the priests who ever lived from Melchisedec to the last exhorter. He would have traversed this globe on foot had it been possible to have found one new fact or to have corrected one error that he had made. No nobler man has lived--no man who has studied with more reverence (and by reverence I mean simply one who lives and studies for the truth)--no man who studied with more reverence than he. And yet, according to orthodox religion, Charles Darwin is in hell. Consolation! So, if Christianity be true, Shakespeare, the greatest man who ever touched this planet, within whose brain were the fruits of all thought past, the seeds of all to be--Shakespeare, who was an intellectual ocean toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought received their dew and rain--that man who has added more to the intelligence of the world than any other who ever lived--that man, whose creations will live as long as man has imagination, and who has given more happiness upon the stage and more instruction than has flown from all the pulpits of this earth--that man is in hell, too. And Harriet Martineau, who did as much for English liberty as any man, brave and free--she is there. "George Eliot," the greatest woman the English-speaking people ever produced--she is with the rest. And this is called "Tidings of great joy."