'Talk of Providence! There is no such thing. I have been through the universe, and there is no God. God is a whim of men; Nature is a fortuitous concourse of atoms; man is a fortuitous concourse of atoms; thought is a fortuitous function of matter, a fortuitous result of a fortuitous result, a chance shot from the great wind-gun of the universe,-which itself is also a chance shot from a chance charge of a chance gun, accidentally loaded, pointed at random, and fired off by chance. Things happen; they are not arranged. There is luck and ill-luck: but there is no providence. Die into dust! True, you sigh for immortality; you long for the dear arms of father and mother that went to the ground before you, and for the rose-bud daughter prematurely nipped. Truc, you complain of tears that have left a deep and bitter furrow in your cheek; you complain of virtue not rewarded, of nobleness that felt for the Infinite, of a mighty hungering and thirst for everlasting life, a longing and a yearning after God. All that is nothing. Die, and be still!' Does not that content you? Does this theory square with the facts of consciousness?

Now look at Atheism as a theory of the life of mankind.

Man came by chance; the family by chance; society by chance; nations by chance; the human race by chance. Man is his own sole guide and guardian. No Mind ever grouped the faculties together and made a cosmic man,-it was all chance. There is no Mind which groups the solitary into families, these into nations, and the nations to a world,-it is all chance. There is no Providence for man, except in human heads. Politicians are the only legislators, their statutes the only law. There is no Higher Law. Kings and presidents are the only rulers; there is no great Father and Mother of all the nations of mankind. There is no mind that thinks for man, no conscience to enact eternal laws, no heart to love me when father and mother forsake me and let me fall, no will of the universe to marshal the nations in the way of wisdom, justice, and love. History is the fortuitous concourse of events, as nature is of atoms; there is no plan nor purpose in it which is to guide our going out and coming in. True, there is a mighty going, but it goes nowhere. True, there has been a progressive development of man's body and mind and the functions thereof; a growth of beauty, wisdom, justice, affection, piety: but it is an accident and may end to-morrow, and the next day there may be a decay of mankind, a decay of beauty, intellect, justice, affection; science, art, literature, civilization may be all forgot, and the naked savage come and burn up Boston, New York, London, and Paris, and drown the last baby of civilization in the blood of the last mother. You are not sure that any good will come of it; there is no reason to think that any good will come of it. Says Atheism, Everywhere is instability and insecurity.'

Look on the aspect of human misery, the outrage, blood, and wrong which the earth groans under. Here is the wife of a drunkard, whose marriage life is a perpetual violation. She married for love a man who once loved her; but the Mayor and Aldermen of the city insisted that he should be made a beast. A beast did I say? Ye four-footed and creeping things of the earth, I beg your pardon! Even the swine is sober in his sty. The Mayor and Aldermen

of the city made this man a drunkard; and the poor wife watches over him, cleanses his garments, wipes off the foulness of his debauch, and stitches her life into the garments which some wealthy tailor will sell, giving her for wages the tenth part of his own profit,—and which some dandy will wear, thanking the Gods of dandies' that he is not like that poor woman, so ill-clad and industrious. She will stitch her life into the garments, working at starvation wages, and yet will pay the fines to keep the street-drunkard out of the House of Correction, where the city government hides the bodies of the men it slays. She toils till at length the silver cord of life has got loosed and the golden bowl begins to break. She goes to my atheist, and asks, What comes of all this? Am I to have any compensation for my suffering?' says, 'Nothing comes cf it; there is no compensation. You are a fool. had better have got a license from the Mayor and Aldermen to prey on other men's wives about you; and then you might have had wealth, and ease, and respectability. You ought to drink blood and not shed your own.'

And the atheist

You

All the Christian world over,' continues our atheist, oppression plies its bloody knout, its well-paid metropolitan priest blessing the scourge before it is laid on. The groan of the poor comes up from the bogs of Ireland, and from the rich farms of England and her crowded manufactories. Men make circumstances in London which degrade two hundred thousand people below the cannibals of New Zealand, and starve the Irish into exile, brutality, or death. The iron gripe of kings chokes the throat of the people. Every empire is girded at the loins with an iron belt of soldiers, which eats into the nation's flesh. Siberia fattens with freedom's noble dead; and in America three millions of men drag out a life in chains, bought as cattle, sold as cattle, counted as cattle, only not prayed for in the Christian churches, as cattle are; and the little commissioners who kidnap at Boston, and the great stealers of men who enact the statutes which make women into things, are honoured in all the Christian churches of the land. Most of "the great men," all the "citizens of eminent gravity," all the "unimpeachable divines," are on the side of wrong. Cry out, blood of Abel! there is no car to hear you. Victims of nobleness! rot in your blood: it will enrich the ground. Ye saints-Catherine, Andrew, Sebastian, Lawrence, Paul, Jesus!-bear your rack and gibbet as best your bodies may. Kossuth! stoop to Francis the Stupid. Ye patriots of France! kneel to Napoleon the Little, and be jolly in the Sodom which he makes. Ye that groan in the dungeons of the world, who starve in its fertile soils, who wear chains in free America! yield to the Jefferies, the Haynaus, the slave-hunters, and the priests! For there is a body without a soul, an earth without a heaven, a world without a God. Atheism is the theory of the universe; and there is no God, no Cause, no Mind, no Providence.'

The atheist looks on the lives of the noble men

"Who in the public breach devoted stood,

And for their country's cause were prodigal of blood,'

and he says, These men were fools; every man of them might have been as sleek, as comfortable, and as fat as the oiliest priest that Mammon consecrates.

They were fools, and only fools, and fools continually. To the individual hero there comes nothing but blood and wounds.'

The atheist sends out his intellect to seek for the controlling Mind, which is the cause of the created, the reason of the conceivable, the ground of the true, and the loveliness of things beautiful. His intellect comes back and has brought nothing, has found nothing but the reflection of its own littleness mirrored on the surface of things. He saw matter everywhere; he met no causal and providing Mind.

He sends out his moral sense to seek the legislating Conscience, which is justice in what is right, the ground of good, the altogether beautiful to the moral sense, the equitable will which rules the world. But his moral sense returns silent, alone, and empty: there is no equitable will, no altogether beautiful of moral excellence, no ground of good, no Conscience which enacts justice into the unchanging law of right; there is only the finite will of man, often erring and always feeble.

He sends out his affections on the same quest, seeking his heart's desire. His affections fly forth with trembling wing, and seek the all-perfect ideal, the the object of their love, to stay the hunger of the heart which craves the Infinite to feed upon and love. But the affections also come back to the sad man with no return. There is nought to love,' say they, 'nothing save man and the ideals of his heart; they are beautiful, but only bubbles; his warm breath fills them for a moment; how fair they shine,-they cool, they perish, and are not! The breath was but a part of the windy cheat which blows along the world,—the bubble breaks and is nothing. There are only finite things for you to love, only finite things to love you in return.'

Last hope of all, as first not less of all, the atheist sends out his soul to seek its rest, and bring back tidings of great joy. Throughout the vast inane it flies, feeling the darkness with its wings, seeking the Soul of all, which at once is Reason, Conscience, and the Heart of all that is, which will give satisfaction to the various needs of all. But the soul likewise comes back, empty and alone, to say, 'There is no God, the universe is a disorder, man is a confusion; there is no Infinite, no Reason, no Conscience, no Heart, no Soul of things. There is nought to reverence, to esteem, to worship, to love, to trust in; nothing which in turn loves us with all its universal force. I am but a worm on the hot sand of the world, seeking to fly-but it is only the instinct of wings I feel; striving to walk, but handless and without a foot; essaying then to crawl, so it be only up. But there is not a blade of grass to hold on to and climb up by, not a weed to shelter me in the intolerable heat of life.

"Thus left alone I look at the ground, and it seems cruel-a mother that devours her young. No voice cries thence to comfort me; it is a force, but nothing more. Its history tells of tumult, confusion, and continual change; it prophesies no future peace, tells of no plan in the confusion.. I look up to the sky; there looks not back again a kind Providence to smile upon me with a thousand starry eyes and bless me with the sun's ambrosial light. In the storms a vengeful violence, with its lightning sword, stabs into darkness, secking for murderable men.

"There is no Providence, only capricious senseless Fate.'

Atheism sits down on the shore of Time; the stream of human history rolls by, bearing successively, as bubbles on its bosom, the Egyptian civilization, and it passes slowly by, with its myriads of millions, and the bubble breaks; the Hebrew, Chaldean, Persian, Grecian, Roman, Christian civilization, and they pass by as other bubbles, with their many myriads of millions multiplied by myriads of millions. Their sorrows are all ended: they were sorrows for nothing. The tears which furrowed the cheek, the unrequited heroism, the virtue unrewarded,—they have perished, and there is no compensation, because it is a body without a soul, an earth without a heaven, and a world with a God. Does not that content you?' asks our atheist.

No man can ever be content with that. Few men ever come to it, thanks to the human heart by which we live!' Human nature stops a great way short of that.

Religion is natural to man. Instinctively we turn to God, reverence Him, and rely on Him. And when reason becomes powerful, when all the spiritual faculties get enlarged, and we know how to see the true, to will the just, to love the beautiful, and to live the holy, then our idea of God rises higher and higher, as the child's voice changes from its treble pipe to the dignity of manly speech. Then the feeble, provisional ideas of God which were formed at first pass by us; the true idea of God gets written in our soul, complete beauty drives out partial ugliness, and perfect love casts out all partial fear.

THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE.

BY W. J. LINTON.

ENACED from without and from within, the existence of the Ottoman Empire can not be long maintained. If Russia could be driven back for once and for all, if all adverse foreign influence should be kept away, it would not save Turkey. The seeds of dissolution are in its own bosom. Slavonian, Roumanian, and Greek, are all outgrowing the bonds of the few millions of Mahometans encamped in Europe. The very Turks themselves believe that their reign is almost at its end. Nicholas is quite right in this the dissolution of European Turkey is fast drawing nigh. Neither Western armies nor Western diplomacy can hinder the inevitable death. For what then is our war? As a matter of right the moribund condition of Turkey does not affect the question. That Turkey is dying is no reason for Russia to slay her one hour before her natural time. Let her die in peace!

That Turkey is dying is no justification for Russia preparing to devour the corpse. We are in the right when we would drive the vulture from the yet breathing, when we say to the devourer-This carcase is not for your devouring; it is the cradle of a new life which must be left free to manifest itself. Whether Turkey is in the last stage of decrepitude or full of lusty life matters not, as regards the justice of standing over her to keep off the Tzar. But justice need not be unwise. There should be a policy in our war. Do we go to war only to set a corpse upon its legs?

It is a poor business that of trying to make a dead body stand upright, or even to make the dying walk. So much dead weight with a tendency to prostration, and such a power as that of Russia opposed to our benevolent quixotism. But what shall be said when, not content with so forlorn a task, we hope to make it less forlorn by calling in another corpse to help us?

All that can be said of Turkish decay may be said as correctly of Austrian. Austria also is dying. Be the issue of the war what it may, the doom of Austria is sealed. Like Turkey, Austria is but an heterogeneous and factitious empire, in whose bosom nationalities are stifled. Like Turkey, Austria owes her present existence only to foreign bayonets protecting her from her own subjects. Leave Austria and Turkey to themselves, and the dying Turk might yet outlive the Austrian. If the ruling Mussulmen are in a minority in Turkey, the reigning German race is also in a minority in Austria, and the Austrians but a minority of the Germans of the Austrian Empire. If four millions of Turks can not stand against thrice their number of Christians, how shall two millions of Austrians maintain rule over sixteen times their number? -or 6,500,000 Germans over more than 28,000,000 Slavonians and Italians? Bankrupt, feeble, and hated, that Austria still exists is due only to the policy of the Tzar, who finds an Austria necessary till he is seated in Constantinople. For it is not only to found a new dynasty of Greek Emperors, nor to be orthodoxly worshiped as the Head of the Greek Church, that the Tzar, with one foot in the Baltic, would plant the other in the Bosphorus. His real aim is a Panslavonian Empire. When he has digested Turkey, he will straightway absorb the Slavonian provinces of Austria. Austria is doomed. She knows it. She dares not hope to escape her evil destiny.

But it may be said that the very fear of this destiny should urge Austria to an honest alliance with Western Europe. In the first place honesty is incompatible with Austrian traditions and character. In the next, how can Western Europe help her? England and France, governed by a Napoleon and a Coalition, may secretly undertake, in defiance of English and French honour and policy and feeling, to keep down Italy and Poland and Hungary, in return for Austrian neutrality, or what is but the same thing in other words-Austrian treacherous help; but England and France can not keep them down. England nor France dare openly take the field to put down Italy and Poland; Poland, Italy, and Hungary will rise, and then-where will be our ally? Austria, in her late death-grapple with Hungary, found no helper but the Tzar; can look for no other help. She is body and soul the Tzar's, though she knows he only keeps her for his own time. The utmost of Austrian hope