But not so in regard to our love of Jesus Christ.  Better never to have seen that glory filling the heavens and earth, and making life a constant thanksgiving and praise, than, after having seen it, to be persuaded by any witchery that it was all a dream—­a fiction of the imagination—­a ghostly superstition—­which it is wisdom to banish from the memory.  For once we have lost Jesus Christ as our ever-living, ever-present, all-sufficient Friend and Saviour, what are we to do?  Can we contentedly fall back upon our own being, or upon any other person, and live on “without Christ in the world!” Or are we in those circumstances to be told that we may still have comfort in “religion without the supernatural,” and rejoice in “the eternal and essential verities of morality!” Only think of it, Christians!  The living man, the light and hope of the family, is murdered; but a disciple of pure science and calm philosophy enters it, and tells its agonised members that it is folly and ignorance to indulge in such grief, for science has analysed their friend, and preserved in a series of neat phials, which they may easily carry about with them, all his constituent elements, his “essentials,” his carbon, his silica, this and that gas—­everything, in short, which made up the substance of him whom they were accustomed to call their beloved; therefore they may “comfort one another with these words!” And thus would the enemy of Christianity presume to comfort us with his “essentials,” when our living Lord is gone!  Comfort indeed!

  “Comfort? comfort scorn’d by devils! this is truth the poet sings,
  That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things!”

But what can the unbeliever himself expect to gain by its destruction?  “I have nothing to do with consequences,” may be his reply, “but with truth only; let every lie be tested and exposed, whatever may be the real or imaginary gain or loss to myself or others.”  Brave words! with which we have the deepest sympathy; for if they are the utterance of a truly sincere heart, they evidence belief, and not unbelief; they assume that there is an order and government in the universe, which is on the side of truth, and that we may therefore, at all hazards, discover what is true, and cling to it in the full assurance of faith,—­that ultimately the right and true are in harmony with all that is worth loving and worth living for.  Amen! we say from our heart.  At the same time, it is well to look at some of the consequences which the destruction of Christianity would involve even to him who destroys it.

It is obvious, for example, that should it cease to exist to us as a reality, other realities would remain irrespective of our belief.  Existence would remain, and it may be one as eternal as the life of God; sorrow and suffering would remain, to gnaw the heart, darken the world, and cast deep shadows over a life which must end with that dread event, death, and the passing away of ourselves and of all we have