God hates laughter and despises mirth. To feel free, untrammeled, irresponsible, joyous,--to forget care and death--to be flooded with sunshine without a fear of night--to forget the past, to have no thought of the future, no dream of God, or heaven, or hell--to be intoxicated with the present--to be conscious only of the clasp and kiss of the one you love--this is the sin against the Holy Ghost. But we had Cowper's poems. Cowper was sincere. He was the opposite of Young. He had an observing eye, a gentle heart and a sense of the artistic. He sympathized with all who suffered--with the imprisoned, the enslaved, the outcasts. He loved the beautiful. No wonder that the belief in eternal punishment made this loving soul insane. No wonder that the "tidings of great joy" quenched Hope's great star and left his broken heart in the darkness of despair. We had many volumes of orthodox sermons, filled with wrath and the terrors of the judgment to come--sermons that had been delivered by savage saints. We had the Book of Martyrs, showing that Christians had for many centuries imitated the God they worshiped. W|e had the history of the Waldenses--of the Reformation of the Church. We had Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's Call and Butler's Analogy. To use a Western phrase or saying, I found that Bishop Butler dug up more snakes than he killed--suggested more difficulties than he explained--more doubts than he dispelled. IV. AMONG such books my youth was passed. All the seeds of Christianity--of superstition, were sown in my mind and cultivated with great diligence and care. All that time I knew nothing of any science--nothing about the other side--nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I heard--of all I read, I could not quite believe. My brain and heart said No. For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a little--I examined maps of the heavens--learned the names of some of the constellations--of some of the stars--found something of their size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits--obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces--found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many years to reach this little world--found that, compared with the great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand--an atom--found that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for the benefit of man, was infinitely absurd.