Connecticut western news., 1899-06-01

complete and eternal smash up. It would make the holding of property a crime, and it would drive a dagger through your heart and put a torch to to your dwelling and turn over this whole land into the possession of theft and lust and rapine and murder.
 Where does this moster liver In all the towns and cities of this land It
 offers it's hand to this fair republic. It proposes to tear to pieces the ballot box, the legislative hall, the congress sional assembly. It would take this land and divide it up, or rather divide it down. It would give as much to the idler as to the worker, to the bad as to the good Nihilism This panther, hav- ing prowled across other lands, has set it's paw on our soil, and it is only wait ing for the time in which to spring upon it's prey. It was nihilism that
 burned the railroad property at Pitts burg during the great riots; it was ni- hilism that slew black people in our northern cities during the war; it was nihilism that mauled to death the Chi nese immigrants years ago. it is nihil- ism that glares out of the windows of the drrnkeries upon sober people as they go by. Ah Its power has never yet been tested. pray God its power may never be fully tested. It would, if it had the power, leave every church, chapel, cathedral schoolhouse and col lege in ashes.
 Let me say it is the worst enemy of the laboring classes in any country. The honest cry for reform lifted by op- pressed laboring men is drowned out by the vociferation for anarchy. The criminals and the vagabonds who range through our cities talking about their rights, when their first right is the they could be hushed up and the downtrodden laboring men of this country could be heard there would be more bread for hungry chil- dren In this land riot and bloodshed never gained any wages.for the people or gathered up any prosperity. In this land the best weapon is not the club, not the shillalah, not firearms, but the ballot. Let not our oppressed laboring men be beguiled to coming under the bloody banner of nihilism. It will make your taxes heavier, your wages smaller, your table scantier, your children hun grier, your suffering greater. Yet this nihilism, with feet red of slaughter, comes forth and offers its hand for this republic. Shall the banns be proclaimed? If go, where shall the marriage altar be2 And who will be the officiating priest And what will be the music That altar will have to be white with bleached skulls, the officiating priest must be dripping assassin, the music must be the smothered groan of multi tudinous victims, the garlands must be twisted of nightshade, the fruits must be apples of Sodom, the wine must be the blood of St. Bartholomew s massacre. No It is not to nihilism, the sanguin- ary monster, that this land is to be married.
 Danger From InfdeIity.
 Another suitor for the hand of this nation is infdelity. When the midnight rufaans despoiled the grave of A. T. everybody was shocked, bat infidelity something worse than that the robbing of all the graves of Chris tendon of the hope of resurrection. It proposes to chisel out from the tomb stones of your Christian dead the words, "Asleep In Jesus" and substi tute the words, "Obliteration-annihi- lation." Infdelity proposes to take the letter from the worlds Father. inviting the nations to virtue and happiness and tear it up into fragments so small that you cannot read word of it. It pro- poses to take the consolation from the broken hearted and the soothing pillow from the dying. Infidelity proposes to swear in the president of the United States and the supreme court and the governors of states and the witnesses in the courtroom with their right hand on Paines "Age of Reason" or Voltaire's "Philosophy of History" It proposes to take away from this country the book that makes the difference between the United States and the kingdom of Da- honey, between American civilization and Bornesian cannibalism. If infideli- ty could destroy the Scriptures, it would in 900 years turn the civilized nations back to semibarbarism, and then from semibarbarism into midnight savagery until the morals of a menag erie of tigers, rattlesnakes and chim- panzees would be better than the morals of the shipwecked human race.
 The only impulse in the right direc-, tion that this world has ever had has come from the Bible. It was the mother of Roman law and of healthful juris- prudence. That book has been the mother of all reforms and all charities
 1mothsr of oaEEa English 5aagna o4 charta and Benjamin Franklin, holding that Holy Book in his hand, stood before an in- fdel club in Paris and read to them out of the prophecies of Habakkuk, and the infdels, not knowing what book it was, declared it was the best poetry they had ever heard. That book brought George Washington down on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge and led ethe dying Prince Albert to ask some one to sing "Rock of Ages. 7
 I tell you that the worst attempted crime of the century is the attempt to destroy this book. Yet infdelity. loath- some, stenchful, leprous, pestiferous, rotten monster, stretches out its hand, ichorous with the second death, to take the hand of this republic. It stretches it out through seductive magazines, and through lyceum lectures and through caricatures of religion. It asks for all that part of the continent already fully settled, and the two thirds not yet oc- cupied. It says: "Give. me all east of the Mississippi, with the keys of the church and with the Christian printing presses-then give me Wyoming, give me Alaska give me Montana. give me Colorado. give me all the states west of the Mississippi, and I will take those places and keep them by right of pos session long before the gospel can be fully intrenched.
 And this suitor presses his case ap- pallingly. Shall the banns of that mar riage be proclaimed? "Nol" say the home missionaries of the west, martyr hoy y,1 ofx bo ;o