The Breckenridge news. (Cloverport, Ky.) 1876-1955, 1893-10-18


its nest and twittered securely. Ant
not only did humber nature thu.
triumph beneath the free air, but within
the church the beautiful face of Jesus
showed the victory Of man over his
fears.
In the same way a recent English
traveller in Thibet, after describing an
idol room filled with pictures Of battles
between hideous fends and equally
hideous gods, many headed and many
armed, says:
"But among all these repulsive faces
OF degraded type, distorted with evil
passions, we saw in striking contrast here
and there an image OF the contemplative
Buddha, with beautiful, calm features,
pure and pitiful, such as they have been
handed down by painting and sculpture
for 2OO0 years, and which the Lamar
(priests) with all their perverted imagi-
nation have never ventured TO change
when designing an idol of the Great
Incarnation.
The need of this high exercise of the
imagination is shown even by the re-
grets Of those who, in their devotion to
pure science, are least willing 10 share it.
The penalties of total alienation from
the religious life of the world are per-
haps severer than even those of super
stition.
CRIES OF DESPAIR.
/ know women who, passing in early
childhood from the gentleness of a Ro-
man Catholic convent TO severly Evan
gelical boarding school, recalls distinctly
how she used in her own room to light
matches and smell of the sulphur, in or
der to get used to what she supposed to
be her doom. Time and the grace of
God, as she thought, saved her from
such terrors at last, but what chance of
removal has the gloom of the severe
agnostic of the Clifford of Amberley
type, who looks upon universe impov-
erished by the death OF Deity?
The pure and high-minded Clifford
said: eve have seen the spring sun shine
out of an empty heaven upon soulless
earth, and we have felt with utter lonli-
ness, that the Great Companion was
dead" "In giving it up" (the belief
in God and Immortality, wrote Viscount
Amberley, whom knew in his generous
and enthusiastic youth, with that equally
high-minded and more gifted wife, both
SO soon to be removed by death, "we
are resigning balm for the wounded
spirit, for which it would be hard to find
an equivalent in all the repertories of
science and in all the treasures Of phil
osophy."
1t is in escaping this dire tragedy-in
believing that what we cease to hold by
knowledge We can at least retain by as
piration-that the sympathy of religion
comes in to help us. That sympathy
unites the kindred aspirations of the
human race. No man knows God: all
strive with their highest powers to
create him by aspiration; and we need in
this vast effort not the support of single
sect alone, like Roman Catholics or Bud
dhists, but the strength and sympathy of
the human race. What brings us here
to day? what unites us but that we are
altogether seeking after God, If haply we
may find him.
We shall find him, if we find him at
all, individually; by opening each for
himself the barrier between the created
and the creator. If supernatural infalli-
bility is gone forever there remains what
Stuart Mill called with grander baptism
supernatural hopes. 1t is the essence of
a hope that it can not be formulated or
organized, or made subject or condition
al on the hopes of another. All the vast
mechanism OF any scheme OF salvation
or religious hierarchy becomes power
less and Insignificant besides the home in
a single human soul. Losing the sup
port of any organized human faith we
become possessed OF that which all faiths
seek. Their joint fellow
ship gives more than the loss of any sin
gle fellowship takes away. We are all
engaged in that magnificent work de-
scribed in the Buddhist "Dhammapada"
or "Path of Light" snake myself an
island work hard, be wise" If each
could make himself an island there
would yet appear at last above these
waves of despair or doubt a continent
fairer than Columbus won.