heaven; and Christ revealed Him not, because He was not there to reveal;
and there was no hope, no remedy, no deliverance, for the miserable among
the sons of men?

Oh, my friends, those who believe, or fancy that they believe such
things, must be able to do so only through some peculiar conformation
either of brain or heart. Only want of imagination to conceive the
consequences of such doctrines can enable them, if they have any love and
pity for their fellow-men, to preach those doctrines without pity and
horror. They know not, they know not, of what they rob a mankind already
but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin; a mankind which, if
it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly--as Homer said of
old--more miserable than the beasts of the field. If their unconscious
conceit did not make them unintentionally cruel, they would surely be
silent for pity's sake; they would let men go on in the pleasant delusion
that there is a living God, and a Word of God who has revealed Him to
men; and would hide from their fellow-creatures the dreadful secret which
they think they have discovered--That there is none that heareth prayer,
and therefore to Him need no flesh come.

Men take up with such notions, I believe, most generally in days of
comfort, ease, safety. They find the world so well ordered outwardly,
that it seems able enough to go on its way without a God. They have
themselves so few sorrows, struggles, doubts, that they never feel that
sense of helplessness, of danger, of ignorance, which has made the hearts
of men, in every age, yearn for an unseen helper, an unseen deliverer, an
unseen teacher.

And so it is--and shameful it is that so it should be--that the more God
gives to men, the less they thank Him, the less they fancy that they need