There are two systems of religious speculation. The one takes man as its center and starting-point, regarding him as a finished fact, practically. In its grosser forms it does not profess to know, as we have been told by the brother who preceded me, whence he came; but it suspects that his nature is evolved out of the brutal. It does not know whither he is going; but it treats the future as the scoffing French sceptic treated it, as at best “a grand Perhaps.” It does not know about God, or whether there be any God other than the sum of universal forces. It has no moral law except a general average of probable experiences. And so it comes to men and tells them to go on and live as they list. It tells them that there is no fear of retribution, no need of atonement, and it has no place in all its compass for any doctrine of regeneration and of the Holy Spirit of God. I do not mean, of course, that everybody who holds this system will accept fully my statement of it. In fact it is sometimes hard to find out exactly how they state it, or what they mean by their statements themselves. I am reminded occasionally of the man who had a clock which somebody criticised, saying, “Your clock, Mr. Jones, does not keep good time.” “Why,” said he, “it does keep perfectly good time, only you do not understand it. The fact is that when the hands on that clock point to twelve, then it strikes three, and what that means is that it wants twenty minutes to seven. [Laughter and applause.] Now if you will keep that in mind, you will hit the right time in every instance.” [Laughter.] Well, I intend to speak very seriously, and yet I cannot help being reminded by some of the language which is made use of in some of these what-we-call agnostic publications, into which the richest Christian words are sometimes brought as if to give a kind of artificial and fictitious consecration to the doctrine which I think a detestable doctrine underneath,—I can not help being reminded of a very careful paraphrase which was made by a very bright and faithful Indian girl at the school at Hampton. Her teacher told her—she did all of this innocently, of course—to take a certain passage of Roman history and write a paraphrase of it in her own words. So she went at it; and when the teacher read the paraphrase she was astounded at finding this statement in it: That “on a certain time the city was made sick by cooking the entrails of animals.” Well, what on earth that meant she could not imagine, nor how it got into this paraphrase, until she turned to the original passage and then she found the statement that “at a certain time the city was disturbed by intestine broils.” [Great laughter and applause.]