I sat in a great theatre at the National Capital. It was thronged with youth, and beauty, old age, and wisdom. I saw a man, the image of his God, stand upon the stage, and I heard him speak. His gestures were the perfection of grace; his voice was music, and his language was more beautiful than I had ever heard from mortal lips. He painted picture after picture of the pleasures, and joys, and sympathies, of home. He enthroned love and preached the gospel of humanity like an angel. Then I saw him dip his brush in ink, and blot out the beautiful picture he had painted. I saw him stab love dead at his feet. I saw him blot out the stars and the sun, and leave humanity and the universe in eternal darkness, and eternal death. I saw him like the Serpent of old, worm himself into the paradise of human hearts, and by his seductive eloquence and the subtle devices of his sophistry, inject his fatal venom, under whose blight its flowers faded, its music [144]
[145] was hushed, its sunshine was darkened, and the soul was left a desert waste, with only the new made graves of faith and hope. I saw him, like a lawless, erratic meteor without an orbit, sweep across the intellectual sky, brilliant only in his self-consuming fire, generated by friction with the indestructible and eternal truths of God.

That man was the archangel of modern infidelity; and I said: How true is holy writ which declares, "the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God."

Tell me not, O Infidel, there is no God, no Heaven, no Hell!

Tell me not, O Infidel, there is no risen Christ!

What intelligence less than God could fashion the human body? What motive power is it, if it is not God, that drives that throbbing engine, the human heart, with ceaseless, tireless stroke, sending the crimson streams of life bounding and circling through every vein and artery? Whence, and what, if not of God, is this mystery we call the mind? What is this mystery we call the soul? What is it that thinks and feels and knows and acts? Oh, who can comprehend, who can deny, the Divinity that stirs within us!

God is everywhere, and in everything. His mystery is in every bud, and blossom, and leaf, and tree; in every rock, and hill, and vale, and mountain; in every spring, and rivulet, and river. The rustle of His wing is in every zephyr; its might is in every tempest. He dwells in the dark pavilions of every storm cloud. The lightning is His messenger, and the thunder is His voice. His awful tread is in every earthquake and on every angry ocean; and the heavens above us teem with His myriads of shining witnesses. The universe of solar systems whose wheeling orbs course the crystal paths of space proclaim through the dread halls of eternity, the glory, and power, and dominion, of the all-wise, omnipotent, and eternal God.