Something--we know not what--a cloud or a blight--has visibly lowered over the face of European civilisation, and in order to set aside certain strange and perplexing inconsistencies of such conduct among us as might induce us seriously to Think--we have flung ourselves eagerly into a vortex of “sensations” new and old, bad and good, virtuous and vicious, with a kind of furious recklessness, bordering on insanity. Any lapse of morals, any bizarre or weird “craze” in art, any indecency in literature, has been acclaimed and encouraged as “new” and “strong” instead of being condemned for being old and weak as such things truly are--and in many vital matters the nation has been moved by a petulant spirit of selfish, restless irritability, like that of a querulous old man who has neither the grace nor the courage to accept his age with wisdom, sweetness, and dignity. And among various mad things we have done, one stands out pre-eminently as the maddest--and that is the tacit encouragement given by a section of society and the press to a brood of Atheists, who have trailed their poisonous slime along the pathways of peace where the youth of this “Happy breed of men, this little world. This precious stone set in the silver sea,” have wandered unsuspectingly, gathering the ugly stain on the innocent white of their souls’ garments. Never did a sin of this nature occur in the history of nations without Divine punishment inflicted, not so much to destroy as to purify. The chronicles of every civilisation ever known or heard of bear unswerving testimony to the truth that whenever a nation or a people assumes to itself Divine right, dismissing from its mind and conscience the idea of any higher Supreme Power before Whom it should humiliate itself daily with thanksgiving and prayer, that nation or people has been allowed to follow the lure of its own intellectual pride and self-sufficiency to inevitable disaster. IDEAL WORTH FIGHTING FOR