(Continued from: The Atheistic Tide Sweeping over the Continent — Part I)

The practical effects of the growth of atheism are too terrible to contemplate. A vessel on an unknown sea. that has lost its rudder and is tossed in a storm—that’s the picture. It will not do for Mr. Ingersoll to say that a purely human code of right and wrong can be established to which the passions of men can be anchored and from which they can swing with safety. It will not do for him to cite his own correct life or the correct lives of the skeptical scientists, or of leading skeptics, as proof that unbelief does not bring license. These men are held to decency by a pride of position and by a sense of special responsibility. It is the masses that atheism will demoralize and debauch. It is thousands of simple men and women, who, loosed of the one restraint that is absolute and imperious, will drift upon the current of their passions, colliding everywhere, and bringing confusion and ruin. The vastly greatest influence that religion has exercised, as far as the world goes, has been, the conservative pressure that it has put upon the bulk or the people, who are outside of the church. With the pressure barely felt and still less acknowledged, it has preserved the integrity of society, kept the dangerous instincts within bounds, repressed savagery, and held the balance. Conscience has dominated men who never confessed even to themselves its power, and the dim, religious memories of childhood, breathing imperceptibly over long wastes of sin and brutality have dissolved clouds of passion in the souls of veterans. Atheism will not work its full effect on this class of men. Even after they have murdered conscience by withholding the breath upon which it lives, its ghost will grope through the chambers of their brain menacing and terrible, and to the last,—

Creeping on a broken wing
Through cells of madness haunts of horror and fear!

It is on the young men and women—the generation bred in the chill atmosphere of unbelief—that atheism will do its worst. With no traditions in which to guide their faith, no altar before which they can do reverence, no ideal to which their eyes can turn, no standard lofty enough to satisfy, or steadfast enough to assure—with no uplifting that is not limited, no inspiration that has wings, and no enthusiasm that is not absurd—with life but a fever that kindles in the cradle and dies in the grave,—truly atheism meets youth with a dread prospect, sullen, storm-swept, hopeless.

In the conflict that is coming, the church is impregnable, because the church is right; because it is founded on a rock. The scientists boast that they have evolved everything logically from the first particles of matter; that from the crystal rock to sentient man is a steady way, marked by natural gradations. They even say that if a new bulk were thrown off from the sun to-morrow it would spin into the face of the earth, and the same development that has crowned the earth with life would take place in the new world. And yet Tyndall says; “We have exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, and yet a mighty mystery looms up before us.” And this mystery is the kindling of the atoms of the brain with the vital spark. There science is baffled for there is the supreme force that is veiled eternally from the vision of man.

The church is not bound to the technicalities of argument in this contest. It has the perfect right to say, and say logically, that something must rest on faith—that there must be something in the heart or soul before conviction can be made perfect. Just as we cannot impress with the ecstacies and transports of earthly love a man who has never loved, or paint a rainbow to a man who has never seen. And yet the time has passed when religion can dismiss the skeptic with a shriek or a sneer. I read one little book a year ago, gentle, firm, decisive; a book that demonstrated the necessity and existence of the Supreme Being as clearly and as closely as a mathematical proposition was worked out. But the strength of the church is, after all, the high-minded consistency of its members; the warmth and earnestness of its evangelism; the purity and gentleness of its apostles. If the creeds are put at peace, and every man who wears the Christian armor will go forth to plead the cause of the meek and lowly Nazarene, whose love steals into the heart of man as the balm of flowers into the pulses of a summer evening—then we shall see the hosts of doubt and skepticism put to rout.