To my mind the essence of the poison is just here. As far as the metaphysical grounds for skepticism are concerned, they are as harmless to the masses as if they were entombed in Greek or Hebrew. Many of the terms, it is true, are often committed to memory and paraded pretty much in the spirit of the college sophomore who affects gold-bowed spectacles and stooping shoulders—it is scholarly, you know. But the real reasons for and against agnosticism rest on psychological and scientific facts too abstruse for the laity to appreciate. There is much subtle sophistry in the oracular utterances of a popular speaker like Mr. Ingersoll, which catch the fancy and charm the imagination of the many. His brilliant blasphemies like the winged seed of the thistle are borne on the slightest breath of wind and find lodgment in the shallowest of soils; while the refutation of them, undertaken in a serious and logical vein is often too conclusive to convince: that is, it is too different in kind to reach the same class of minds that have been inoculated with the poison germs.
My own object, however, is neither to argue nor to refute argument here. I want to utter just this one truth:—The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit. A great man said of France, when she was being lacerated with the frantic stripes of her hysterical children,—_France needs a religion!_ And the need of France during her trying Revolution is the need of every crisis and conflict in the evolution of nations and races. At such times most of all, do men need to be anchored to what they _feel_ to be eternal verities. And nothing else at any time can propel men into those sublime efforts of altruism which constitute the moral heroes of humanity. The demand for heroism, devotion and sacrifice founded on such a faith is particularly urgent in a race at almost the embryonic stage of character-building. The Hour is _now_;—where is the man? He must _believe_ in the infinite possibilities of devoted self-sacrifice and in the eternal grandeur of a human idea heroically espoused. It is the enthusiasms, the faiths of the world that have heated the crucibles in which were formed its reformations and its impulses toward a higher growth. And I do not mean by faith the holding of correct views and unimpeachable opinions on mooted questions, merely; nor do I understand it to be the ability to forge cast-iron formulas and dub them TRUTH. For while I do not deny that absolute and eternal truth _is_,—still truth must be infinite, and as incapable as infinite space, of being encompassed and confined by one age or nation, sect or country—much less by one little creature’s finite brain.