Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/367

 glorious vitality of Faith, which, like the blood in our veins, keeps us warm and young and vigorous? Or must we perish in the devil-clutch of Materialism, and go down to the depths, thrust there by the very men who have been elected to hold us close to God? We demand our rights in the Divine and Eternal Love!—and these rights, born in us from the beginning, we will have, even if all present-existing human forms and fabrics of creed go down in our struggle for the one pure faith under whose holy influence we shall become stronger and wiser, and better able to understand our work and place in creation! The gates of Life shall not be shut upon us;—we will not accept the materialist's latter-day testimony that death shall be the end of all. For if there be an Eternal Good we are part of its being and share in its Eternal attributes. And we say,—we Souls of the Nations,—to all our preachers and teachers and representatives of the Divine on earth—Lift us up! Do not cast us down! Be yourselves the models of what you would have become!—so shall we be willing and ready to learn from you,—so shall we honour, love and patiently follow you. But if you, as ministers of religion, show yourselves worse hypocrites than the very sinners whom the law condemns, then beware of us and our just vengeance! For you take from us our very life-blood, when you cheat us of the hope of Heaven!"

This is true. A Nation robbed of its faith, is like a human body robbed of its heart—it has neither pulse nor motion,—it is the mere corpse of itself lying prone in the dust of perishable waste things. And the fact that grave retribution will