Reading is the nurse of culture; reflection the mother of genius. Our great religions were born in the desert. Our grandest philosophers budded and burgeoned in the wilderness. The noblest poesy that ever swept the human harpsichord was born in the brain of a beggar, came bubbling from the heart of the blind; and when all the magi of the Medes, and all the great philosophers of Greece had failed to furnish forth a jurisprudence just to all, semi- barbarous Rome laid down those laws by which, even from the grave of her glory, she still rules the majestic world. I have been accused of being the enemy of education; but then I have been accused of almost everything; so one count more or less in the indictment doesn't matter. I am not opposed to education that is useful; but why should we pay people to fill the empty heads of fools with soap and sawdust? Perhaps the most aggressive fraud that infects the earth is the professional atheist--the man whose chief mental stock-in-trade consists of doubt and denial of revealed religion, so-called. About the time a youngster first feels an irresistible impulse to make a fool of himself wherever a female smiles upon him; when he's reached that critical stage in life's journey when he imagines that he knows much more than his father, he began to doubt the religion of his mother; shrewdly asks his Sunday-school teacher who made God; demonstrates by the aid of natural history diagrams, that a large whale could in nowise swallow a small prophet-- that if he did succeed in relegating him to its internal economy it were impossible for him to slosh around for three days and nights in the gastric juices without becoming much the worse for wear. He attempts to rip religion up by the roots and reform the world while you wait, but soon learns that he's got a government contract on his hands, --that the man who can drive the Deity out of the hearts and homes of this land can make a fortune turning artesian wells inside out and peddling them for telegraph poles. You can't do it, son. Religion is the backbone of the body social. Sometimes it's unbending as a boarding-house biscuit, and sometimes it's a bad quality of gutta-percha; but we couldn't get far without it. Most youths have to pass thro' a period of doubt and denial--catch the infidel humor just as they do the measles and mumps, but they eventually learn that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.