[NOTE: The following article was published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1881. The editor of the Constitution, Henry W. Grady, wrote this piece after contemplating the devastating rise of atheism in America. Though Grady was not a preacher of the Gospel and though everything he says does not square completely with Scripture, his words, in many ways, are prescient. Atheism has now swept across America. Its fundamental premise is founded upon the false theory of evolution and its training centers are taxpayer-funded public schools and universities. Don’t expect to see a similar article anytime soon in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. The current editors are blind to the atheistic scourge about which Grady warned more than a century ago.—Charles L Alligood]

The Threatened Destruction of the Simple Faith of the Fathers by the Vain Deceits of Modern Philosophers.—An Attack Christians Must Meet.

[written for the Constitution, 1881.]

New York, January 26.—The dread of the times, as I see it, is the growing skepticism in the leading circles of thought and action throughout the country—a swelling tide of atheism and unbelief that has already swept over the outposts of religion.

I am not alarmed by the fact that Henry Ward Beecher shook hands with Ingersoll on a public stand, and has since swung beyond the limit of orthodoxy, any more than I am reassured by the fact that Stephen H. Tyng has, by indorsing the miracles of Lourdes swung back into the stronghold of superstition. These are mere personal expressions that may mean much or little. They may be classed with the complaint of Dr. Talmage that he found religion dead in a circuit of 3,000 miles of travel last year, which complaint is balanced by the assertion of Dr. Hall that the growth of religious sentiment was never so decisive as at present.

I have noted, in the first place, that the latter-day writers—novelists, scientists and essayists—are arraying themselves in great force either openly on the side of skepticism, or are treating religious sentiment with a readiness of touch and lack of reverence, that is hardly less dangerous. I need not run over the lists of scientists, beginning with Tyndall, Huxley and Stephens, that have raised the banner of negation—nor recount the number of novelists who follow the lead of sweet George Eliot, this sad and gentle woman, who allied sentiment to positivism so subtly, and who died with the promise on her lips that her life would “be gathered like a scroll in the tomb, unread forever”—who said that she “wanted no future that broke the ties of the past,” and has gone to meet the God whose existence she denied. We all know that within the past twenty years there has been an alarming increase of atheism among the leading writers in all branches. But it is growth of skepticism among the people that has astonished me.

I am not misled by the superb eloquence of Ingersolll nor the noisy blasphemy of his imitators. I was with five journalists, and I found that every one of them were skeptics, two of them in the most emphatic sense. In a sleeping-car with eight passengers, average people I take it, I found that three were confirmed atheists, three were doubtful about it, and two were old-fashioned Christians. A young friend of mine, a journalist and lecturer, asked me a few months ago what I thought of his preparing a lecture that would outdo Ingersoll—his excuse being that he found Ingersoll so popular. I asked Henry Watterson once what effect Ingersoll’s lectures had on the Louisville public. “No more than a theatrical representation,” was the quick reply. Watterson was wrong. I have never seen a man who came away from an Ingersoll lecture as stout of faith and as strong in heart as he was when he went there.

I do not know that this spirit of irreligion and unbelief has made much inroad on the churches. It is as yet simply eating away the material upon which the churches must recruit and perpetuate themselves. There is a large body of men and women, the bulk probably of our population, that is between the church and its enemies; not members of the church or open professors of religion, they have yet had reverence for the religious beliefs, have respected the rule of conscience, and believed in the existence of one Supreme Being. These men and women have been useful to the cause of religion, in that they held all the outposts about the camp of the church militant, and protected it with enwrapping conservatism and sympathy. It is this class of people that are now yielding to the assaults of the infidel. Having none of the inspiration of religion, and possessing neither the enthusiasm of converts nor the faith of veterans, they are easily bewildered and overcome. It is a careless and unthinking multitude on which the atheists are working, and the very inertia of a mob will carry thousands if the drift of the mass once floats to the ocean. And the man or woman who rides on the ebbing tide goes never to return. The church may reclaim its sinners, but its skeptics never.

It is not surprising that this period of critical investigation into all creeds and beliefs has come. It is a logical epoch, come in its appointed time. It is one of the penalties of progress. We have stripped all the earth of mystery, and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitched its crucible for an analysis of the soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine—a vastness and vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret; felt its most secret pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed it and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstrated; what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all that was vague on earth, and reduced very mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored very theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself, and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders as the shores of a star that lights the space beyond our vision are to us to-day; the Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of wonder; ships that were freighted from the heart of Africa lie in our harbor, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than bewildered the builders at Babel; a letter slips around the earth in ninety days, and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean; we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined; we even read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor, shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and measureless depths of the universe. Fit time is this, then, for science to make its last and supreme assault—defy the last and supreme force. And the church may gird itself for the conflict! As the Pope has said, “It is no longer a rebel that threatens the church. It is a belligerent!” It is no longer a shading of creed. It is the upsettal of all creeds that is attempted.

It is impossible to conceive the misery and the blindness that will come in the wake of the spreading atheism. The ancients witnessed the fall of a hundred creeds, but still had a hundred left. The vast mystery of life hung above them, but was lit with religions that were sprinkled as stars in its depths. From a host of censers was their air made rich with fragrance, and warmed from a field of altars. No loss was irreparable. But with us it is different. We have reached the end. Destroy our one belief and we are left hopeless, helpless, blind. Our air will be odorless, chill, colorless. Huxley, the leader of the positivists, himself confesses—I quote from memory: “Never, in the history of man, has a calamity so terrific befallen the race, as this advancing deluge, black with destruction, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.” And yet Mr. Huxley urges on this deluge with furious energy. The aggressiveness of the atheists is inexplicable to me. Why they should insist on destroying a system that is pure and ennobling, when they have nothing to replace it with; why they should shatter a faith that colors life, only to leave it colorless; why they should rob life of all that makes life worth living; why they should take away the consolation that lifts men and women from the despair of bereavement and desolation, or the light that guides the feet of struggling humanity, or the hope that rolls even the grave or its terror,—why they should do all this, and then stand empty-handed and unresponsive before the yearning and supplicating people they have stripped of all that is precious, is more than I can understand. The best atheist, to my mind, that I ever knew, was one who sent his children to a convent for their education. ” I cannot lift the blight of unbelief from my own mind,” he said, “but it shall never fall upon the minds of my children if I can help it. As for me, I would give all I have on earth for the old faith that I wore so lightly and threw off so carelessly.”