The silver state. [volume] (Winnemucca, Nev.) 1909-1925, 1920-03-16
PUT AWAY
THE HAMMER

As we get old most of US seem t.
also get not only full of rheumatism
and indigestion, but prunes an(
cynicism. This is probably because
experience has taught the old tina
there is ten times more bunk and dis
honesty in the world than truth anC
love and sunshine, all of which you'll
has yet to learn, and not having
learned it is yet hopeful, enthusiastic
and optimistic.
This is a tendency, however, which
we should all strive to stave off az
long as possible, for welding the
hammer of grouehiness is entirely
profitless from any angle looked at
and also reacts like a boomerang
which more often than otherwise re-
| turns to the thrower and knocks his
block off.
We notice this tendency in writer's
and hope and pray we may be spared
from it, for if ever the time comes
when we can no longer see anything
in our fellow man to love and respect
and praise, then we want to take pas
sage on old Charon's boat and paddle
across the river Styx, and mingle oul
tears and groans and lamentations
with those of Judas, Nero and Pontius
Pilot and other old cumgrudeons.
W. rOto .r;tI o.no, .Io4 III ITo.vo
of Howe's Monthly, who witicism and
good philosophy in the Atchison
Globe of years ago was copied al
ove the country, is getting in thai
class. presumably because he is past
seventy years of age. Nothing is just
right. Everything is on the bling
and also everybody. And having
gone the rounds in finding fault with
the world and all its people, institu-
tons, ways and mannerisms, he now
gets around to religion and the
church and declares one to be a myth
and the other a failure.
When any man gets to the point
where the whole world, its inhabi-
tants and their religions and churches
are failures, that is nothing more
or less than proof positive that the
man himself is a failure. To he who
looks through a smoked glass every
thing is black.
Howe now writes that few any
longer believe in the dogmas of the
Christian religion; that the church
is decaying because people no long
er believe in it; and that death ends
all, there being no immortality.
Take away the religion Of the
world, and mankind's hope of inn
mortality, and there is nothing left
to live for any more than any beast
or brute or wild animal has. And
those who advance any such cursed
theory always stop when they have
killed all hope and love and sunshine
in the heart and mind of a convert
never leaving him anything better OF
as good, but leaving him totterine
alone and unaided toward the grave
with not even a crutch to sustain his
broken heart, broken mind and
broken body.
That is what all such people do
seek to chop out the only support
mankind has, and offer nothing alb
solutely nothing-in its place.
The church is not a failure-it does
more good today than any other in
stitution on earth. People are not
leaving it-they go in countless
thousands, all over the world and
a thousand times more often and in
millions more in number, than when
Moses made the laws which stand as
solid granite today throughout all
the ages, or when Christ on the cross
of Calvary said, as we say now OF
these skeptics. cynics and agnostics
Father, forgive them. they know not
what they do"