RELIGION.--Religion may teach us a pessimistic view of the world, and to bow like cringing slaves unquestioningly to the rod. We may accept that all is for the best whether we understand it or not, as the unalterable decree of fate, yet as rational beings we recoil from this bondage, and the questions are ever present, of the purpose of this life and the evidences of that future of which the most doubting dream. Religion, resting as it does on the immortality of the spirit, should answer us so plainly and absolutely that there could be no doubt. That there is weeping and broken hearts shows that it does not, or else that it makes that existence so terrible that the dread of it is more than that of annihilation. The fear of Hell, which has driven the world to madness, is now cast into the lumber room with other errors, outgrown, and in the free atmosphere one can not understand the terrors it once awakened. The arbitrary heaven is also passing away, and a more natural conception of the future life is gaining precedent. Yet the words of teachers of religion are cold and soulless, and even the poets, touched by the finger of a decaying faith, voice the incredulity of the age in lines which speak only in despair. Oh! poet of immortal song, how chilling to the heart the words that yet too often find response in its doubts and fears: “And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But oh! for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still. “Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead, Will never come back to me.” There is little consolation to be found in these directions. Let us turn back to first principles; let us for a time forget the claims of scientists and take up the book of nature at her plain alphabet and ascertain whether these claims of material science have a sure foundation. What is the Sensitive State? A RACE WITHOUT SIGHT.--If the human race were born without organs of vision, man could form no idea of the beautiful and splendid phenomena revealed to the eye. The normal state would be blindness. Day and night would be marked by intervals of repose and activity, but the cloudy midnight and the radiance of the sun, the glories of morning, the splendors of sunset, the star-gemmed canopy of the cloudless night, the infinite changes, the phantasmagoria of heaven and earth, would be unknown. The flowers might bloom in beauty, their fragrance would delight, but their form and color would be unrecognized. The mind, deprived of the infinite series of sensations which flow into it through the sense of vision, would have none of the conceptions thereby engendered. If a being who could see should attempt to reveal to the sightless race the beauties of the world as seen by the eye in the light, they would treat him as an impostor relating an idle tale, to them incomprehensible.