And, after all, what was the harm? for do not philosophers tell us that a people’s conception of the Deity is but the reflex of the powers of nature (be they kindly or hostile) by which they are surrounded? And was not this a fair land? and if their sun was bright, but not too fierce, and their wheat-fields nodded to soft breezes, but knew not the hurricane, and if their snows were a fairy mantle for mother-earth, rather than a shroud, and Jack Frost spread, over pond and creek, ice just thick enough to store against what time the mint—the jolly jolly mint—should sprout,—if all nature smiled, why should these merry Norman-English pull long faces? Nor did they, but laughed and danced, bless their jovial souls! But a time came when merrie England was merry no longer. Somebody had invented a new religion. It floated down upon her, a dense fog, impenetrable to the mild radiance of the star of Bethlehem. Floated across the Atlantic, and darkened our life, too. With us, as well, laughter became frivolity, and dancing blasphemous. There are rifts in the fog now, and here and there the sun is bursting through; but at the period of our story the shadow was unbroken. There was laughter, it is true. Do not the condemned often make merry in their cells? and young people will dance,—just as lambs frisk, even upon a bed of mint—heedless,—for ’tis their nature to. But they laughed and danced under a shadow,—the shadow of the next world. That world, alone, was real,—so we thought,—while this, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, was (though it seemed so solid) but a fleeting show, for man’s illusion given. And of this theology, which spread, like a black pall, over the land, this was the central conception; and I give it for the reason that you will not find it laid down in the books, or in any single discourse. It is the epitome of the thousands upon thousands of sermons which I (not that I would boast) have heard in my day. Listen; for this was the atmosphere that our Mary breathed: The world is the battle-ground of two mighty beings, the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil. These two, from the first appearance of man on earth, have unceasingly battled together, the one to save him, the other to destroy. To save mankind—to destroy mankind—that has been the sole contention these thousands of years. Incidentally, of course (for such is war), the Evil Spirit has, beyond the harm done the human family, wrought immense damage to earth’s fauna and flora (as the innumerable imperfections of nature testify), but man, alone, has been the objective point of all his strategy; and with every new soul that comes into the world the conflict is renewed.