victory, he is frequently expert enough in the guile pertaining to his profession to put a displayed heading on those same dispatches which clearly saves the day for the Democrats—­or vice versa.  And I have also noticed that it takes true mental pluck to rightly scan, first, that rooster of roosters (invented during the last few years), then the ten lines of Democratic Io Paians which follow, and lastly, the small type containing the real facts.

MAN IS SO MUCH LIKE A FISH

that certain bait is sure to catch him.  The morning after the election the most astute Republican or Democrat in the country trembles before the terrors of a ten-line Democratic or Republican displayed heading, as the case may be.  Now the crafty atheist has a way of laying down fallacies which often terrifies one into involuntarily believing that those fallacies are facts, until one stops to think that the atheist is but a man, after all, and that there is an appeal from his findings.  It is, therefore, in the defense of humanity that I advance against him,

HOPING TO HIT HIM BECAUSE HE IS SO BIG,

and to escape his blows because I am so small.  “What though the day be lost, all is not lost!” Though man have glaring faults, he is still a problem far beyond the fiat of any atheist.  He still has a destiny.  The atheist lays down dogma after dogma.  In this changing world, where even the little balance-wheel of a watch must be “compensated,” it is clearly as impossible for any atheist to lay down an undeviating dogma as it was for the Cretan to truly say that all Cretans were liars!  “Broadly, an unselfish deed is impossible.  There never was a human thought that reached beyond the human body.”  Let us capture those two atheistic dogmas and take off their displayed headings.

AWAY BACK ON THE PLAINS OF CHALDAEA,

in the youth of the world, there lived men who watched their flocks by day and the hosts of heaven by night.  Their study of the heavens lifted them out of themselves, in my belief, and their observations of celestial phenomena led them to the discovery of the fact that eclipses of the great heavenly lights happened in a regular rotation of eighteen years and ten days.  This discovery has been very useful in purging the idolatry from eclipses—­as, had it not been for the Chaldaeans, perhaps the mother of the atheist might have offered him as an oblation in

THE FIRST TOTAL ECLIPSE

after his birth!  Again, Proctor and Airy have been for ten years mapping stars for the use of humanity 25,868 years after the map is done—­that is, that period will furnish the first opportunity for the utilization of a truly laborious task.  There is no glory in it.  The difference between glory and hard work in astronomy is just the difference between Ptolemy and Hipparchus.  The one made a great noise in the world and got up an atheistic solar system which put science back a thousand years, while the other stayed on his island and mapped stars to the best of his ability, rendering possible some of