Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/97

 And stranger still it is to realize, that while those who do not admit God's existence, strut forth like bantams on a dunghill, crowing their little opinions about the sun-rise, we are all held fast and guided, not only in our physical, but in our moral lives by immutable laws, invisible in their working, but sooner or later made openly manifest. Crime meets with punishment as surely as night follows day. If the retribution is not of man's making,—if human law, often so vicious and one-sided in itself, fails to give justice to the innocent, then Something or Someone steps in to supply man's lack of truth and courage, and executes a judgment from which there is no appeal. What it is or Who it is, we may not presume to declare,—the Romans called it Jove or Jupiter;—we call it God, while denying, with precisely the same easy flippancy as the Romans did just before their downfall, that such a Force exists. It is convenient and satisfying to Mammonites and sensualists generally, to believe in nothing but themselves, and the present day. It would be very unpleasant for them to have to contemplate with any certainty a future life where neither Money nor Sex prevail. And because it would be unpleasant, they naturally do not admit its possibility. Nevertheless, without belief in the Creator and Ruler of all things,—without faith in the higher spiritual destiny of man as an immortal and individual soul, capable of progressing ever onwards to wider and grander spheres of action, life in this world appears but a poor and farcical futility.

Yet it is precisely the poor, farcical and futile view of life that is taken by thousands of European