philosopher in his study must regret. But as to their philosophy being
correct: there can be no question that if providence, and prayer, and the
living God, be phantoms of man's imagination, then the cynical worldling
at one end of the social scale, and the brutal savage at the other, are
wiser than apostles and prophets, and sages and divines.

These men talk of facts, the facts of human nature. Why do they ask us
to ignore the most striking fact of human nature, that man, even if he
were a mere animal, is alone of all animals--a praying animal? Is that
strange instinct of worship, which rises in the heart of man as soon as
he begins to think, to become a civilized being and not a savage, to be
disregarded as a childish dream when he rises to a higher civilization
still? Is the experience of men, heathen as well as Christian, for all
these ages to go for nought? Has it mattered nought whether men cried to
Baal or to God; for with both alike there has been neither sound nor
voice, nor any that answered? Has every utterance that has ever gone up
from suffering and doubting humanity, gone up in vain? Have the prayers
of saints, the hymns of psalmists, the agonies of martyrs, the
aspirations of poets, the thoughts of sages, the cries of the oppressed,
the pleadings of the mother for her child, the maiden praying in her
chamber for her lover upon the distant battle-field, the soldier
answering her prayer from afar off with, "Sleep quiet, I am in God's
hands"--those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most noble,
most pure, most beautiful, most divine, been all in vain?--impertinences;
the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into nowhere, to no thing, and
in vain? Has every suffering, searching soul which ever gazed up into
the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even a glimpse of a
divine eye, beholding all, and ordering all, and pitying all, gazed up in
vain? For at the ground of the universe is "_not a divine eye_, _but
only a blank bottomless eye-socket_;" {39} and man has no Father in