CHAPTER I. ABSURDITIES OF INFIDELITY. THE PRESENT AN EARNEST AGE--AN EARNEST RELIGION REQUIRED--YOUNG MEN LIABLE TO SKEPTICISM--LITERARY FOPS--SCIENTISTS DO NOT AGREE--TESTIMONY OF SOCRATES AND PLATO--ABSURDITIES OF BRAHMINISM--ATTEMPTS OF FRENCH INFIDELS--ROSETTA STONE--MODERN SPIRITUALISM.

The gospel is truly a grand system. Let us try to entertain right views concerning it. Let us enlarge our minds to grasp it, that we may, to some extent at least, conceive its greatness and appreciate its beauties.

The peculiar wants of the age in which we live are worthy of deep and careful consideration. Never was there a time in the history of the race, when learning and general intelligence were so well diffused as at the present. The press is throwing off continually its millions of printed pages, which are scattered broadcast as the leaves of Autumn. Books on almost every conceivable subject can be cheaply bought; and journals, magazines and pamphlets, both of a good and evil influence, attract the attention of the young.

Never was there a time of more intense activity. Who can pass through the crowded streets of our cities, listen to the throbbings of the steam-engine, the hum of machinery, the appliances of electricity, gaze at the vast trains that are driven with fire and vapor along our railways, or view those magnificent structures that cross the mighty deep, without feeling that this is an earnest age?

Now, this earnest, active, thinking age demands a religion that has life and power in it. Not a religion of cold formality and narrow sectarianism, but a religion that will satisfy the intellect with its truths, touch the heart with its love, sway the will with its persuasiveness, gratify the taste with its beauties and fill the imagination with its sublimities. A religion is wanted that will enlist upon its side the whole nature of man, and command his willing and devoted homage; a religion that, bearing the full impress of its Author's image, shall carry its own credentials with it; and which, clothed with all the elements of truth and righteousness, beauty and grandeur of love and power, shall be revered by all those who love the truth, and dreaded by all who love it not.

This is the religion that the gospel reveals. There is no antagonism between philosophy and faith, between science and religion, whatever the seeming oppositions of the present; in reality it is perfect harmony. The gospel overwhelms, nay, rather, includes all philosophy.

In the life of many young men there is a period of skepticism. Then the young man is extremely liable to doubt. Then he questions all his previous convictions, challenges all his accepted opinions, and is in danger of drifting aimlessly on the wide tossing sea of unbelief, the sport of every wind of doctrine, the easy prey of every theory conceived by the ingenious brain of man.

At this period his faith in God and man is liable to be swept away through a misconception of the real teachings of science, and the example of those who seek to excuse their wicked lives under the specious plea of unbelief. This period of skeptical tendency comes early in life, frequently when the young man is in college or in the schools of science, when he begins to think and act for himself. It is intelligent, earnest young men of brains and capacity who are in special danger from the skepticism of the age.

Many of these young men have been trained in the Sabbath school, but at nineteen or twenty a change comes over them. They feel the strength and vigor of awakening manhood, and that impatience of authority which is characteristic of young men in this formative period of life. A young man hears of men of learning who reject religion; he reads now and then a magazine full of doubts and insinuations, and he begins to feel that all his belief is simply the result of his education, and that under other circumstances he might have been a Confucian, a Buddhist or a Mahometan. Perhaps he meets with a tolerably educated but skeptical friend, who tells him in effect that religion is a fraud, that the Bible is a very good book, to be sure, but destitute of divine authority. He tells him, in a word, that these things may do for women and children to believe, but as for himself, he has put away all such belief along with his childish toys.

Our young man listens to all this flippant nonsense with itching ears, until, at length, he pretends to believe the world was made by chance, is governed by chance and all things that exist are only the effects of chance.

But there is a comical side to this question, as well as to many others. Prof. Agassiz wisely observes that, "men frequently talk very learnedly of what they know but very little;" and I know of nothing more irresistibly ludicrous than to see one of these so-called scientific skeptics, who scarcely knows the difference between the leg of a wasp and the horn of a beetle, and yet will assume to patronize the Almighty and talk about progress and culture as though he was the most remarkable prodigy of the age in which he lives.

It is enough to disgust an honest man, to see some of these literary fops going along with Darwin's works under one arm and a case of transfixed grasshoppers and butterflies under the other, talking about Huxley's "protoplasm" and "natural selection," and "nebular hypothesis," and "biogensis," and "abigensis," all the while lisping with an "exthquithit lithp," and indicating by word, tone and gesture that all who dissent from their opinions are grossly ignorant and scarcely worthy of their notice.

But the greatest joke is that the scientists which they so much admire do not agree. Darwin is charging at Lamarch, Walace spearing Cope, and Herschel denouncing Ferguson. How many colors in a ray of sun-light? Seven, says Newton; only three, says David Brewster. How high above the earth is the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Light? Two and a half miles, says Prof. Lias; one hundred and sixty-five, says Prof. Tumming. La Place says the moon was not put in the right place, it should have been four times as far away; while Prof. Lionville comes up just in time and gives us the wonderful information (?) that the Creator was acquainted with His business and fixed it exactly right.

How far is the sun from the earth? Less than a million miles, says Zadkiel; seventy-six millions of miles, says La Caille; eighty-two millions, says Humboldt; ninety millions, says Henderson; one hundred and four millions, says Mayer. Only a slight difference of one hundred and three millions of miles, or a good deal farther than a person could travel, at the rate of fifty miles per hour, during the next two centuries, if he could live that long. And yet, amidst all this confusion and contradiction, we are coolly asked to give up the words of inspiration and hang our hopes of the future on the miserable vagaries of self-contradicting philosophers.

Another very ludicrous as well as amusing instance of the folly of infidelity is the fact that skeptics will catch at almost anything upon which to hang their faith. All around us, in every grade of society, are to be found men who will tell us that the Vedas and Shasters of the Hindoos are far more trustworthy than the writings of Moses, Isaiah, Paul, Nephi or Joseph. They will tell us what sublime philosophers Brahma and Confucius were, while, at the same time, they have never read a word of their doctrines, or even seen a volume of their works. All they know is what some other truth-hating infidel has told them.

But for the sake of argument let us glance at some of these wonderful writings. Socrates, one of the greatest of heathen philosophers, admits, "We must of necessity wait till some one from Him, who careth for us, shall come and instruct us how to behave toward God and toward man."

Plato declares, "We cannot know of ourselves what will be pleasing to God; it is necessary that a law-giver should be sent from heaven to instruct us." And he further adds, "Oh, how greatly do I long to see that man!" (Plato's Republic, Book iv and vi.)

Who has not felt sad at the dying words of Socrates, "I am going out of the world and you are to continue in it, but which of us has the better part is a secret to all but God." Nor is the philosophy of India any better. A few years ago, when, through the labors of Oriental scholars, the Vedas and Shasters of the Hindoos were translated and printed in European languages, a great shout went up from the army of infidels. "Here," said they, "is the true chronology. Henceforth the Jewish records must hide their heads." Accordingly the Shasters were, for a time, in high repute among those who knew very little about them.

Now, when we remember that these much-vaunted histories profess to reach back through ma-ha-yugs or epochs of 4,320,000 of our years, that a thousand of these epochs makes a kalpa or one day of the life of Brahma—the nights being of the same duration—and that his life consists of one hundred years of such days and nights, we can easily see the absurdity of these histories. In these works are also the records of the seven great continents of the world, separated by seven rivers and seven chains of mountains, four hundred thousand miles high, and the history of the families of their kings, one of whom had ten thousand sons, another sixty thousand who were born in a pumpkin, nourished in pans of milk, reduced to ashes by the curse of a demon and restored to life by the waters of the Ganges. These records give statements of wonderful eclipses, comets and deluges, seven of which covered the earth, not merely to the top of these wonderfully high mountains, but even reaching to the polar star. Yet infidels have the assurance to quote these as standard works of undoubted authority, and worthy of the credence of intelligent beings. (Duff's India, page 127.)

Nor are the promises of the future life any less absurd than the foregoing. "Tell me," said a wealthy Hindoo, who had given all his wealth to the Brahmins who surrounded his dying bed, that he might obtain a pardon of his sins, "what shall become of my soul when I die?" The priest replied, "Your soul will go into the body of a holy cow." "And after that?" he asked again. "It will pass into the body of a divine peacock." "And after that?" "It will pass into a flower." "Where, O, where will it go last of all?" cried the dying man. "Where will it go last of all? Ah! that is the question."

While British infidels were admiring the sacred writings of the Hindoos, and holding them up before the world as superior to the word of God, French skeptics were busy in a similar employment. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, in 1798, he took with him a large corps of scientific men. In the ceiling of a temple at Dendera, in Upper Egypt, some of these scientists discovered a stone, tablet covered with strange characters. These characters, it was concluded, were a representation of the relative positions of the sun, moon and stars at the time the temple was built; and, calculating backwards, it was found that this could not be less than seventeen thousand years ago. This tablet was taken from the ceiling of the temple and carried away to France, and placed in the national library in Paris. Hundreds of thousands came to see the antediluvian monument, and infidel commentators were never wanting to inform them that this remarkable stone proved the whole Bible to be a series of lies. One of the discoverers, afterwards a professor in the University of Breslau, published a pamphlet, entitled, "Invincible proof that the earth is at least ten times older than is taught by the Bible." During the next thirty years, scores of such publications followed; and the base slander received many additions and improvements, until it was a common saying that this stone proved that "the priests of Egypt were carving astronomy on their pyramids ten thousand years before Adam was born."

It did not shake their credulity in the least, that no two of their wise men were agreed by some thousands of years, how old the stone was—that no one even knew the first principles of the Egyptian system of astronomy, and that none of them could read the hieroglyphics.

But, in 1832, the curious Egyptian astronomy was studied, and it then appeared that this object, which had caused so much commotion, was simply a calendar stone to aid in the measurement of time; and that the positions of the sun, moon and stars were so placed to enable common observers to ascertain the beginning of the year. At length, by means of the Rosetta Stone—which furnished a key to these hieroglyphics—Champolion and others learned to read the inscriptions on Egyptian monuments.

Rosetta Stone

[Rosetta Stone, showing present and original form, and specimens of Greek, Coptic and Hieroglyphic characters.]

The Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French, in 1799, at Rosetta, Egypt. When in a perfect condition it was a tablet of black basalt, three feet high, two feet five inches wide, and ten inches thick. The inscription was in three languages: Coptic, Greek and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. On the publication of the inscriptions it was found that they were the key to the hieroglyphic characters. It was then discovered that the names of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, were engraved on the stone, as well as the names of the Roman emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and Domitian. The inscriptions revealed the fact that they had no reference to early Egyptian history. The edifice in which the first-mentioned stone was found was simply a heathen Roman temple, built between the fourteenth and eighty-first years of the Christian era. Even at the present time, in the noon-day of modern science and so-called civilization, astrologers, mediums, clairvoyants and fortune-tellers by the hundred find a profitable business among those who consider themselves too learned, wise and progressive to believe in the word of God. One infidel lecturer even advertises that he will reveal to you the secrets of the future and cure you of any disease you may have, if you will only enclose in a letter a few hairs taken from your right temple and—and—a—ten dollar bill. Concerning the future life, infidels have every variety of oracles, conjectures and suppositions; but for their guesses they have no proof. The only thing upon which they seem agreed is in denying the resurrection of the body. According to their ideas, a poor, naked, shivering, table-rapping spirit, obliged to fly over the world at the sigh of any brainless fop or silly, sentimental girl, or the bidding of some brazen-faced strumpet, is all that ever shall exist of all the great and good men and women that have lived upon the earth. To such wild unreason does the mind of man descend when it rejects the gospel, for only through it life and immortality are brought to light. A year or two since, the leader of American infidels, Robert Ingersol, was called to deliver a funeral oration over the body of his brother. In that short discourse there were many beautiful sentiments: but through it all, as through a transparent glass, was shown the need, which even Ingersol felt, of divine revelation and divine guidance.