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

disappointed hopes;' the other stood for the future, with all it's Infinite oppor- tunities. The servant of the grandest
 earthly empire; the king of the mystic
 Kingdom of the heart. Pilate. the scep-
 tic! Jesus, the saviour! "
 Let us look for moment this evening at the two types of soul that stand
 facing each other in that old judgment
 hall We have first the cry of the
 sceptic, What is truth?" Scepticism
 is the disease of thought, and often
 arises as a sort of mental indigestion,
 from over-indulgence at the banquet of knowledge, and lack of exercise in the
 harvest fields of love. As soon as the
 refiuent wave of any enthusiasm be-
 gins to sink back into the great sea of
 indifference, scepticism never thinks to look to see whether the tide is coming
 in, but immediately cries out that the
 cause is entirely lost. As soon as the
 petals begin to fall away from the flow
 CT of faith, scepticism never examines
 it to see whether they have been push
 ed out by the seed bulb of promise, but
 bemoans the fact that religion has ut
 terly passed away. Scepticism is al
 ways around at the moulting time of truth, and when any great thought leaves it's ''outgrown shell by life's un- resting sea" you see 1t sitting down be- side the old deserted shell, forgetting the more stately mansions" and the "domes more vast. and weeping over the demise of truth. The silver cord of it's faith is always loosed; the pitcher it carries to the fountain is always broken. It grows like fungus on the decay of fallen beliefs and the ruin of rotting systems. It sounds a retreat in the rear, at the very time the shouts of victory are rising in front It likes the crumbling walls of an old deserted faith, and while the Spirit of the AL mighty is leading His followers on to new conquests, scepticism fingers with the wolves and tigers in the solitude of the forsaken temple, pronouncing it's
 "dust to dust" over. the broken idols. I once listened to a lecture by very eloquent man, who died not long ago, on the mistakes the inconsistencies, the falsehoods, the superstitions, of the Christian religion. With merciless sar- casm and scathing rhetoric he kept us wavering for an hour between laughter and indignation, as he revealed the de- formities and laid bare the weaknesses of the Christian church; butt though I was studying for the ministry at the time, and though I agreed with nearly everything he said I went out from. that place even more of a believer than I was when entered, for the Christian ity he attacked was that of five hundred years ago. While the proud banners of the cross was leading the armies of faith over the broad fields of the fu- ture, this man was ridiculing the blundering tactics and making merry over the ignominious defeats of cam paigns long since past and forgotten. He called himself an "agnostic." He asked the question, What is truth?' Like Pilate, he did not wait for a re- ply. He would have us think 1t was mere will-o'- -the-wisp that sometimes fingers with it's false light over the grave of dead systems What is truth? A dream of a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, leading foolish children to follow it over the fields, only to get their feet wet and lose themselves in the woods. What is truth? A mirage that appears to the thirsty and dust
 stained .traveler over a dreary desert, promising him figs and olives and sparkling springs, leading him far away from his path over the wide wastes of sand, and vanishing suddenly like the lifting of a morning mist. 4 What is I truth? A fancied pathway over the frozen river of superstition which lyc nm ir, no cl1r1Iiyht pf lSDou1adoa when we are half way across, and leaves us to drift in hapless unbelief, or drops us into the depths of complete destruc- ' ton. Such is the answer of sceptieism. Mingling the ingredients of doubt too freely with the cup of life, forgetting the proportion love ought to bear in the chemical formula of true existence, it finds it's head growing dizzy and it's duty growing dim, until thought ends in bankest nihiIism, and action dies of the paralysis of despair. Scientists tell us that this solid and substantial world on which we now stand was once a mere nebulous vapor of star mist, with out definite center or fixed boundaries. floating aimlessy through the endless realms of space; but, somehow there suddenly appeared in it's mist, a pole, stretching along through its center, around which it began to reyolve and solidify, until at last it became the firm and stable planet upon which we have found a foothold. The reversal of this process is the way sceptic is made. Let mans religion, lack the divine polarity of some definite pur- pose; let the loving center of sympathy