The name was hissed out, and tossed from one rank to another of the audience, and one or two of the police present glanced enquiringly towards Bernhoff their chief,--but he sat with folded arms and inscrutable demeanour, making no sign. Lotys raised her small, beautifully-shaped white hand to enjoin silence. She was obeyed instantly. “I speak of no one man,” she said with deliberate emphasis; “I accuse no one man,--or any man! I say ‘if’ any man gambles with State policy, he is a traitor to the country! But such gambling is not a novelty in the history of nations. It has been practised over and over again. Only mark you all this one God’s truth!--that whenever it _has_ occurred--whenever the rulers of a State _are_ corrupt,--whenever society sinks into such moral defilement that it sees nothing better, nothing higher than the love of money,--then comes the downfall!--then Ruin and Anarchy set up their dominion,--and Heaven’s rage rolls out upon the offenders, till their offence be cleansed away in rivers of blood and tears!” She waited a moment,--and changing her attitude, seemed as it were, to project her thought into her audience, by the sudden passion of her commanding gesture, and the flash of her deep luminous eyes. “We have heard of the Great Renunciation!” she said; “How God Himself took human form, and came to this low little earth to prove how nobly we should live and die! But in our day,--we with our preachers and teachers, our press and our parliamentary orators,--our atheistical statesmen on all hands, have come upon the Great Obliteration!--the Obliteration of God altogether in our ways of life! We push Him out, as if He were not. He is not in our Churches--He is not in our Laws--He is not in our Commerce. Only when we are brought low by pain and sickness--when we are confronted by death itself--then we call out ‘God! God!’ like cowards, praying for help from the Power we have negatived all our lives! Here is the evil, O children all!--we have forgotten Our Father! We arrange all our affairs in life without giving Him a thought! Our pleasures, our gains, our advantages,--are calculated without consulting His good pleasure. He is last, or not at all,--when He should be first, and in everything! The end of this is misery;--it must be so; it cannot by law be anything else. For what is God? Who is God? God is a name merely,--but we give it to that Unseen, but ever working Force which rules the Universe! The coldest atheist that ever breathed must own that somehow,--by some means or other,--the Universe _is_ ruled,--for if it were not, we should know nothing of it. Therefore, when we set aside, or leave out the consciousness and acknowledgment of the Ruler, the ruling of our affairs must, of necessity, go wrong!