DRYDEN'S GRATITUDE. 39 depth and breadth of that which here and now passeth understanding. "O gracious God! how well dost Thou provide Oh, teach me to believe Thee thus concealed, Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake! My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires; Followed false lights, and when their glimpse was gone Be Thine the glory and be mine the shame! ATHEISM. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Gen. i, 1. "Heaven's unnumbered host, Though multiplied by myriads, and arrayed I am, O God, and surely Thou must be! Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart." Russian Ode, by Derzhaven. THE way-worn traveler will gladly drink from the cool, clear, sparkling torrent that breaks from lofty and solitary rocky fastnesses, and rolls tumultuously over somber precipice and along jagged channel to the dusty plains, though its source may be hidden from his curious eyes, and forever remain inaccessible to his adventurous feet; and truth's mountain-stream should ever be as welcome to earth's weary thinkers, however hidden its springs may be in heights unapproachable, and in depths unfathomable. If venerable tradition, chronicled by the Koran, repeated by Stanley, and rehearsed by Clodd, is to be credited, thus was truth, the grandest, mightiest, and most mysterious,- welcomed by Him who is honored by Moslem, Jew and Christian as the Father of the Faithful. Born in Ur of the Chaldees, on the verge of the vast Assyrian plains, which for ages had been the seat of idolatrous sun-worship, Abraham turned from a system, custom-sanctioned and convention-hallowed, to embrace a AN ABRAHAMIC LEGEND 41 simpler and a purer faith. The mythical story of his conversion is not without beauty and instructiveness. It represents Terah, his father, as a maker of wooden idols; and shows how the son's antagonism to the corruption of religion, which the business symbolized, developed and culminated. Being left one day in charge of the stock in trade, Abraham was profoundly impressed at the folly and superstition of a woman, who devoutly brought food to satisfy the hunger of things which, though they had mouths, could not eat, and which were as unable to appreciate gifts as they were to appropriate them. But his indignation grew fiercer, and his views of duty clearer, when an aged man entered his tent and desired to purchase of his wares. "How old art thou?" "Threescore years.' "What, threescore years!" answered Abraham, “and thou wouldst worship a thing that my father's slaves made in a few hours? Strange that a man of sixty should bow his gray head to a creature such as that." Unable longer to restrain his scorn, and reason asserting its sovereignty over conflicting doubts, after the departure of his would-be customer he broke all the idols to pieces except one. The largest one he spared, and placed in its hands the hammer which had served him in his iconoclasm. When Terah returned he was filled with horror and consternation at the work of destruction which he beheld, and angrily demanded the name of the irreverent wretch who had dared to raise his impious arm against the gods. 66 "Why," quietly replied the then youthful patriarch, during thine absence a woman brought them food, and the younger and smaller ones immediately began to eat. The older and stronger god, enraged at their unmannerly boldness, took the hammer which you see in his hands, and crushed them all before him.” "Dost thou deride thine aged father?" cried Terah. "Do I not know that they can neither move nor eat?" "And yet thou worshipest them," exclaimed Abraham; "and thou wouldst have me worship them as well." This rebuke was too much for the outraged parent, and consequently, according to the legend, he sent the wayward youth to the king for admonition and correction. When Nimrod heard the account of his infidelity and impiety, instead of condemning him hastily and harshly he sought to win him to some form of faith. "If thou canst not adore the idols fashioned by thy father," said the accommodating monarch, "then pray to fire." "Why not to water, which will quench the fire?" "Be it so; pray to water." "But why not to the clouds which hold the water?” "Well, then, pray to the clouds." Why not to the winds, which drive the clouds before them?" 66 Certainly, please yourself; pray to the winds.” "Be not angry, O king!" finally replied Abraham. “I cannot pray to the fire, or the water, or the clouds, or the winds, but to the Creator who made them: Him only will I worship." Neither would he be persuaded to adore the sun, moon and stars, for he discerned that they were not stationary, and he said, as he contemplated the heavens, "I like not things that set; these glittering orbs are not gods, as they are subject to law: I will worship Him only whose law they obey." Science is the modern Terah. In these days it is energetically reviving idol-making, a trade which by this time ought to be hopelessly insolvent. The chief workmen who seem to be interested in this enterprise are Comte, Haeckel, Darwin, Vogt, Huxley and Spencer, and the gods they have thus far manufactured are variously called "Proto THE NEW IDOLATRY. 43 plasm," "Evolution," "Primitive Fire-Mist," "Promise and Potency Theory," and "Creation by Law Hypothesis." In these thought-idols a thriving business is being driven, and, as in the case of the foolish woman and the venerable man in the Abrahamic legend, many souls are substituting them in the place of the one ever-living and true God. They who have shaped these little mechanical deities, and who expose them to public view, do not assert that there may not be above them or behind them Something or Somebody to the mind unknown and unknowable, but they do assume that they are all-sufficient to account for the origin and order of the universe, without invoking the interposition of any hyperphysical or supernatural agencies or Agent. It is evident that the drift of such speculations is in the direction of Atheism; for when every reference to the Almighty is sneered at as unscientific, when He is practically ruled out of His own creation, and when second causes are invested with His attributes and credited with His work, the denial of His existence is logically demanded and cannot be long postponed. A superfluous Deity is the next thing to an imaginary Deity; to deprive Him of usefulness is to rob Him of being; to say that He does not is substantially to say that He is not. This is just the impression the new Terah is making on society, and the hammer of Abraham is needed to destroy the false gods that hide from the creature the reality and nearness of the Creator. Multiplied voices, like his, are demanded to denounce the fetich-worship developing from modern thought, and to point out the absurdity of scientific Nimrods reaffirming what Descartes has long since disproved, that dynamical force inheres in matter, or that law, which at the best is only a formula, can of itself enact itself, and from itself evolve a universe. The advocates of undisguised and absolute Atheism, and the idol-makers who sympathize with them, are more or |