The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-04-05

revolve around any axis of activity and
 design, and his belief will begin to dis
 integrate and dissolve and melt away into a misty, nebulous. incongruous mass of floating ideas, without boun-
 dary or aim, in the midst of which he
 loses his way and cries out in doubt or cynicism What is truth?"
 But there is another type in our pie
 ture. ITO this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness unto the truth" Scepti- cism claims the past; but belief owns the future. No fog of human indiffer- ence can so pervade the atmosphere of a doubting world, no powerful and prosperous organization of evil can so take possession of drowsy society, that the human soul will cease to start with surprise and shame and become
 entirely reconciled to that which Is wrong, and that the protest of native
 purity deep down in the heart will not
 rise at least to become the instrument
 of vengeance and the defender of truth.
 The old saying of Lacodaire that truth is the abstract name of God, as God is the concrete name of truth, repre-
 sents a conviction that is deeply rooted in the soil of our humanity, and he who invents lie and labels it with living, name, he who tries to stop the stream
 of infinite purpose with the mill-dam of
 his prejudice, he who endeavors to en- force falsehood with unjust court
 decisions and armies of mercenaries,
 only becomes the victim and the mock
 cry of the ages, When Copernicus has
 once found the true place of the sun in the heavens, they may drive him forth
 as an exile to wander from place to place, but they cannot make him dis loyal to his discovery, or take his oath
 that he believes In a lie At 1 o'clock
 on the tenth day of September, in the year 1907, the first steamboat, "Fulton's s
 Folly" left the wharf in New York for it's trial trip to Albany, and Fulton Aim- self said at noon on that day not thirty persons in the entire city Of New York had the slightest faith in the success of his enterprise. At the Worlds Fair, as I was moving about among the marvellous discoveries and i constant surprises of that wonderful place, I remembered how Socrates be- lieved that the physical sciences were hidden from the eyes of man, and that | it was blasphemous to pry into them, land I thought How would enjoy one day with the old philosopher in the
 midst of this galaxy of human pro-
 gress." I wonder what he would think of that triumph of truth that has cour- 1ageously faced awful forces, supersti- 1 tiously regarded as the scourges Of | God, and has so mastered them that the
 galley-slave and the chair-porter, and the water-carrier are no more,and every year the number of men grows less and less who are doomed to beastlike toll. I wonder what he would think of a land where even the slave has voice in the government, where men are drawn through the streets by the light ming and talk with each other on a wire over distance oe thousands Of miles. and above all where the streets are lined with schools for orphans, with homes for the aged, with retreats for the insane, with hospitals for the sick, and with reading rooms for the work ingmen. In Athens they had the tenn pie, the courthouse, the gymnasium,
 the circus, the bath; but not one monu-
 ment can you find dedicated to the
 sentiment of sympathy and the labors of mercy. That was a gift Christianity
 gave the world The influence and in
 spiration imparted from soul to soul
 the power of the affections to subdue the wild beasts of passion in our fel-
 lows; the ability of love to sweeten
 bitter experiences, bear heavy burdens,
 and light up the cloud of sorrow with the rainbow of hope; these were
 thoughts not often heard in the ancient
 world We have made wonderful pro- gress not only in cultivating the will
 derness and retaining the wild lands,
 not only in keeping back the. pestilence from the city and mastering the thun-
 derbolt and the river, but in growing
 harvests of mutual helpfuness and res
 cuing outcast souls, in separating the
 gold of love from the slag of selfish
 ness and killing the germs of class hat
 red and greed.
 What shall we say of the man who
 sits in, the midst of all this progress,
 like LaMancha in Don Quixote, astride
 of an old wooden horse of scepticism, declaring that there Is no "far-off di- vine event toward which the whole creation moves" and bemoaning the static conditions of the universe because
 his steed will not carry him beyond his
 little glass plot of selfishness? I know
 the limits of the powers of the brute,
 I know that in all probability that the elephant will never paint a landscape,
 sheep will never write book on
 "theodicy," nor rate enunciate new theory of the entity of the noumenon.
 This 1 know because I am more than brute. Let him who would tell me the limits of the powers of our humanity be more than a man. The faith that stands with bowed head and humble attitude before the mysterious possbil- ities of the future, declaring that all the glories and achievements of the past are as nothing to the wonders, greater than eye hath seen or ear heard that shall be revealed in the days to come. is removed so far as the East is from the West from that chilling az nosticsm which blights every hope and paralyzes every effort with it's dogmatic decree of the futility of human knowl- edge and the vanity of human endeav- or. Once let this assumption be grant
 l. 1tu.