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Show The Matter of Faith. A distinguished Protestant clergyman of New England thinks that Protestantism is passing and is to be succeeded by a new Catholicism; that Mother Church has this advantage over Protestantism, Protest-antism, that it enters the home and clings always to the family, while children go out from Protestant Protest-ant homes and wander away from their religion. Now we cannot discuss religious themes for the double reason that wo are not capable of doing such a "thing and second we would not do anything any-thing to disturb any one's faith. But wo can see nothing to justify that clergyman's conclusions, where people are equally free and intelligent. For instance, look at Protestant England and Catholic Catho-lic France. Are there any signs of what the clergymen in New England sees visible in those two countries? Religion comes much more from the heart than the Intellect. We have . sn very learned men and women puzzling away all their lives in trying to grasp the subject of religion as it is taught in the books and from the puplit; trying to grasp its mysteries and ever failing. But at the same time we have seen an old colored col-ored woman who never learned to read, sitting in absolute contentment, without a speck or flaw on the clear shield of her faith and entirely certain of the joy of the life that awaited her beyond this life. She never tried to reason out what is abstruse to brighter and more cultivated minds. With her it was but a case of "Lord I believe," and that with her covered the whole case. As we read history religion among men is but as the swinging of a pendulum, or perhaps it would be better to compare it to the coming and going of rainy seasons, in this latitude. They go and come, some years so light that the world seems parched and drying up, and then they come on again in full volume. Just now the civilized nations are passing through a metallic age, and many of them love money passing the love of woman, more than they love God or their own homes. But it will not bo strange if a great religious re-ligious move sweeps this country in the next very few years. We fancy we see it on the march now in the south and that prohibition in that section is the first low wash of the wave of the sea that is to be. We believe the chief conflict that is going go-ing on in men's souls on that subject is to adjust ad-just the rebellion of their intellects with the pleadings of their own hearts. Their brains are always throwing off doubts; their hearts are always al-ways pleading for a deeper cultivation of that faith out of which religion grows, and they cannot understand that the old colored woman in her unquestioning un-questioning faith Is wiser than they, and not many can understand that about all there is to religion is to comfort the poor, visit the sick and the fatherless and for man to do to others as ho would have others do to him. And then that would take so much time and it would be such a trouble. It certainly is time for a new wave of faith to sweep over the earth. |