selfishness, man is at heart a creature of sentiment, and religion is the poetry of the common people. Crude it may be, but its tendency is toward the stars, while all else in man is animalistic and of the earth. Strike the religion, the poetry, out of a people, and you reduce them to the level of educated animals. Annul the power that draws them upward and they must sink back to primordial savagery. The individual may accept logic as a substitute for sentiment, but a nation cannot do so. The masses are not swayed through the head, but through the heart. Sentiment is the divine perfume of the soul. Of sentiment was born the dream of immortality. It is the efficient cause of every sacrifice which man makes for his fellow man. It is the parent duty, and duty pre-supposes the Divine. Could the materialists inaugurate their belauded age of reason, sentiment would perish utterly in that pitiless atmosphere, and the world be reduced to a basis of brute selfishness. The word duty would disappear, for why should man die for man in a world whose one sole god was the dollar. Why should a Damien sacrifice himself if selfish ease be the only divinity? If there be no Fatherhood of God there can be no Brotherhood of Man--we are but accidents, spawn of the sun and slime, each an Ishmel considering only himself. Atheism means universal anarchy. It means a kingdom without a king, laws without a legislator, a machine without a master. An Atheist is a public enemy. He would not only destroy the state but wreck society. He would render life not worth the living. He would rob us of our garden roses and fill our hands with artificial flowers. And why? Because, forsooth, he finds that some articles of religious faith are impossible fables. He sits down with a microscope to examine the tables of the law for tracks of the finger of him whose sentences are astral fire. He finds a foolish contradiction in some so-called sacred book and imagines that he has proven either that man's a fool or God's a fraud. "By geometric scale he takes the measure of pots of ale." He calls himself a "liberal," while fanatically intolerant of the honest opinions of others. He is forever mistaking shadow for substance, the accidental for the essential. He "disproves" religion without in the least comprehending it. He hammers away at the Immaculate Conception and the miracles with a vigor that amuses those who realize that cults and creeds are but ephemeral, while faith in the Almighty endures forever. And of all the Atheists and Agnostics Bob Ingersoll is the most insupportable. He is but a mouthful of sweetened wind, a painted echo, an oratorical hurdy-gurdy that plays the music of others. He's as innocent of original ideas as a Mexican fice of feathers. He gets down on the muddy pave and wrangles with the "locus" preachers. He's a theological shyster lawyer who takes advantage of technicalities. He is not a philosopher--he's emphatically "a critic fly." He