St. Landry democrat. (Opelousas, La.) 1878-1894, 1886-10-09
Judge FenIler's Faith.
Iicayulle.

Picayune.
That was a grand and at the same
time a touching confession of faith
which Judge Charles E. Penner, of
New Orleans, professed before the
Alumni of the University of Virginia
that venerable alma mater, dear to
every Southern heart, which has sent
forth through the land less sciolism and
more science, less doubt and more
faith, less sophistry and more phileso-
phy, than any other institution Or high
er education IN the country. He came
before them remembering that an alu-
munus is a person who has been fed and
nnurls'led, with soul full of grateful
memories, and remembering, among
other things, the simple faith which he
had professed on the college stage, and
reflected on the false science which is
crowding the outer world and destroy
ing true faith, and seeing before him
young men who were gong out into
that doubling and disbelievirg world
he exposed to them his heart and soul,
and showed them thereon writ large
the same simple faith which he had so
long ago taught in that place. No be-
lifting or sneering at the great teach
ers Of agnosticism, he came against
them "to the help of God against the
Mighty as the quaint Eastern phrases
it: " speak here said Judge Fenner,
" for man, for nature, and for God
And he spoke long and well, and with
power given of the Spirit.
Let us go back a little minute, away
back through the unforgotten years, to
the boy Fenner stands in the presence
OF his assembled fellows, and listen
to his faith as it came to his youthful
understanding My simple faith then
was" says he, " that man was fit to
live, that life was worth living, that
there WAS Living God, that He was
all wise and all good, that He had crea-
ted man for some wise and benevolent
purpose, that He had endowed him with
reason, with free will, with a sense Of
right and wrong, with noble faculties
of thought and knowledge and senti
ment and action, and with an immortal
soul, that God had framed the circum-
stances by which man was surrounded,
and had devised the agencies which
shaped his destiny. that the lives of in
dividuals and even of nations We're
but insignificant fractions of the life of
the human race, furnishing no sufficient
data to enable us to divine the ulti-
mate purposes of God, but that how
ever inexplicabe and contradictory
| these transitory facts may appear, the
predicate of Gods all-wisdom and all
goodness sustains and justities a per-
| feet confidence that all these circRm-
stances and agencies will be so directed
as to achieve the highest and best de-
velopment of mans nature and cohdl-
| ton on earth.'
We may stop here an instant to OBJ
serve that when man of the age and
position of Judge Fenner thinks it
worth while to make such a confession
as this, the mere fact carries more
weight than whole libraries of eold~
blooded logic. For such man has
| lived life, and knows life, and feels it
throbbing in his breast in a realistic
way which no argument can touch.
The celebrated philosopher Plato once
rebuked youth of agnostic tenden-
cies bv mildly observing to him that
he had known many of such mind, and
that not one ever had continued to old
age to maintain his opinion.
But Judge Fenner did not stop here.
He struck with an uneering aim straight
into the central core of all argument
which issues upon agnosticism, and
pointed out the place where it aban-
dons logic, becomes illogical and inco-
herent, and defies reason. We need not
set forth the agnostic argument in de-
tail Suffice it to recall the universal
position upon which it rests, the pres
ence of universal law.
"Now the first thing that strikes
one," says the eloquent Judge, is the
strange process of reasoning by which
from the existence of law is deduced
the certain or even the possible nom
existence of law maker In no def
nation of law that 1 have ever heard Of
can it be dissociated from an origin i'll
will and sanction in power. Laws
cannot make themselves, nor can they
spring from chance. The very concep-
ton of law carries with it the concep
ton of will sufficiently wise to ordain
and sufficiently powerful to enforce it,"
The Judge, perhaps unconscious ly,
without being versed in the subtilities
of the metaphysical schools, has formu-
lated metaphysical argument of the
finest texture, as keen as the temper Of
a Damascus blade, so effective that it
has never been overturned. In philoso-
phic phraseology, he has stated one of
the postulates OF practical reason OF
all the conceptions of the human rea-
son, the deepest rooted and most ine-
radicable is the conception of law, a
conception indissolubly yoked With its
essential prerequisite and condition,
!, the existence of the Author of law.
GYes.n said the lady lecturer, two