things and turn instinctively to pay homage to the Author of their being — and God is life. Now this turning of our whole being to God, as the sunflower to the sun — to God, the way, the truth, and the life — this is religion. And that it is a fundamental law of our nature is attested by the fact that in all the nations of the world, past or present, you will not find one without its religion. Here and there a blasphemous monster will assert his unbelief, but his voice is drowned in the chorus of adoration that ascends from the world to the throne of God. True, the system of truths of this savage people may be preposterous; the moral code of that other, barbarous; this nation may worship the sun or moon or some graven thing; the object of that other's worship may be a myth; but still it is ever the same craving of the soul for the way, the truth, and the life — for God, Hence, I say, the man of no religion— the man who forsakes or neglects his religion— is a living lie. His whole life is a contradiction — a perversion of Nature. In his words and actions he asserts, probably boasts of, his unbelief, but his heart, his soul cries out: "Thou liest; deep down in thy being is the consciousness of God's existence and thy soul's immortality, and the essential relations of each to the other." Further still, he is a moral suicide. He stifles into silence the most sacred aspirations of his soul, and refuses her the truth and love as necessary to her existence as food and drink to the body. He is worse than the idolater or the fetish worshipper. Nay, I would yenture a step
