"Meantime, as a late king of Naples was said to have erected the negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, the single source of power,' ourselves 'conscious automatons' in whom 'mind is the product of the brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a 'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank. But it was Mephistopheles who said,-- "'The little god of this world sticks to the same old way, And is as whimsical as on creation's day; Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him. He calls it Reason--thence his power's increased To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving thy gracious presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper seems to be, That springing flies and flying springs, And in the grass the same old ditty sings. Would he still lay among the grass he grows in.' "But even the man of theories might grant that the scheme of one great, governing, guiding, loving, and holy God is a theory that works wonders in practice for those that heartily receive it, and is a conception of magnificence beside which even a Nebular Hypothesis with all its grandeur grows small. And the man of facts may as well recognize what Napoleon saw on St. Helena,--the one grand fact of the living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy battalions; a force that this hour beats in millions of hearts, all over this globe, with a living warmth beside which the love of science and art is cold and clammy. Surely it would be not much to ask for the docility to recognize such patent facts as these. And I must believe that any mind is fundamentally unhinged that despises the profoundest convictions of the noblest hearts, or speaks lightly of the mighty influence that has moulded human events and has upheaved the world. It has, in its arrogance, cut adrift and swung off from the two grand foci of all truth, the human and the divine.