The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1880-08-28
No GOd-.-NO Hope.

AS RIVERS polish pebbles into ever-in-
creasing brightness, so the stream of
Time keeps common truths attractive
by polishing them into newness, giving
to trite things a perpetual novelty.
This sentiment is illustrated by the
effect of time upon the apostolic truism
that to be without God is to be without
hope in the world. When the world
was young, and, therefore, fresh in its
faith, this was an accepted fact which
no skepticism cared to deny. If any
daringly surrendered God, they there
by also, and consciously, gave up those
hopes of which God is the source. 1t
has been reserved for these days to
claim the possibility of a religion
without God and hope without its
divine inspiration. And yet, however
practically useful Mr. Mill may think
religion without God would be, he is
not so absurd as to claim for it any
value as to that which may be beyond.
His God OF humanity can give no hope
for any possibility which may lie be-
You'd the grave. From the very con-
ception of Christian hope, as being the
expectation of religious good in this
world and the next, he who has no God
can have no such hope. For the OBJ
jects of hope, if not divinely revealed,
may be a fancy or sentiment, but
nothing more. Only Columbus could
tell the court of Isabella of the beauties
of the new world. He alone had been
there. Only God who is in the eternal
light can tell us of the landscape on
which it falls.
The hopelessness of skepticism is,
therefore, essential to it. Longfellow,
in opening Hyperion" says: ''The
setting of great hope is like the set
ting of the sun. 1t leaves darkness be-
hind" Of course those who have
stricken the sun from the heavens of
their thought, have darkness as the re-
suit. When Clifford, the great math-
ematician, lay a-dying, he said: -
have lived to see the sun shining out
of an empty sky. The great compan-
ion is dead" Who can fail to see the
hopelessness apparent in these frank
words? Or in these of the world
wearied Byron: 81 have no conception
of any existance which duration would
not make tiresome." The visions of
Olympus which the old Greeks en-
joyed brought them no hope of any
personal share in that splendid dream
of immortality, or supplied it with
such conditions as took away its glory
and desirability. The inscriptions on
heather tombs are in marked and
wonderful contrast with those in the
catacombs. The former breathe only
OF death and sorrow in such words as
these: "My heart is broken;'' "my
life has gone out" The latter breathe
triumph in every word and every rude
ly carved symbol.
The most remarkable of modern at
tempts to revive somewhat of the poet
ic beauty of a heather religion is to be
found in Edwin Arnold brilliant poem,
"The Light of Asia" But through it
even as it is colored by the Christian
atmosphere the same dreary
shadow. In speaking of Nirvana the
Buddhist heaven-which however, is
nothing but extinction, the poet puts it
sadly thus:
"The dew is on the lotus,
Rise Great SUM
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave.
The sunrise comes,
The dew-drop slips into the shining sea-"
How perfectly the gloom of these
words accords with the last results of
skeptical science. Strauss affirmed he
was going into darkness. A great
Frenchman dying said he was going in
to the great " Perhaps" and a recent
philosopher, resigning himself apathet-
ically to a goddess philosophy, finds
consolation in the thought that the
time will come when the idea of i'm
mortality will be burdensome thought
for which we will cease to long! Over
against such words let the great apos-
ties triumph be rung, 81 know whom
| have believed" and Henceforth
there is laid up for me CROWN and
it becomes apparent that goddess sys-
tenn carries hope down with it as the
sinking of boat quenches all her lights.
and that faith and hope together, like
twin eagles, soar high above every
earthly disaster.
Those, then, who have God should
have hope. That means more than q
preparation for death. 1t means a