The Peril of the Republic of the United States of America - Percy T. Magan

none remaining beyond the circle of the silent,
patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual
atmosphere was saturated with cant--cant moral,
cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high
principle which had ceased to touch the conduct,
and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere
and unreal speech. The truest thinkers were those
who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their real
convictions, declared that Providence was a dream,
and that man and the world he lived in were
material phenomena generated by natural forces
out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again
dissolved.
“Tendencies now in operation may a few
generations hence land modern society in similar
conclusions, unless other convictions revive
meanwhile and get the mastery over them; of
which possibility no more need be said than this,
that unless there be such a revival, in some shape
or other, the forces, whatever they be, which
control the forms in which human things adjust
themselves, will make an end again, as they made
an end before, of what are called free institutions.
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