CHAPTER I.

PRESUMPTIONS.

Πάντες τε θεῶν χατέουσ ̓ ἄνθρωποι.

HESIOD.

Τίνος γὰρ ἄλλου ζώου ψυχὴ θεῶν τῶν τὰ μέγιστα καὶ κάλλιστα συνταξάντων ᾔσθηται ὅτι εἰσί; τί δὲ φῦλον ἄλλο ἢ ἄνθρωποι θεοὺς θεραπεύουσι.

I

SOCRATES.

REMEMBER well, when I was passing from boyhood into youth, some fifty years ago, shortly after the battle of Waterloo, there was a general conviction in the public mind—at least in that large section of the public which is more mightily stirred by the present than taught by the past—that after so many years' wild turmoil of guns and bayonets there was now an end for ever of that culmination of sanguinary horror called War; and I remember no less distinctly how when, a few years afterwards, by the advice of a stout old doctor of divinity in Marischal College, Aberdeen, I waded my way through that most interesting of all ancient theological

B

treatises, "Cicero de Naturâ Deorum," and had finished the perusal with the abiding belief that that culmination of all speculative absurdities called Atheism was a thing of the past, and could no more reappear on the stage of credible things than those old women suspected of holding communion with the Evil One, who, not more than two hundred years ago, used to be flung into the milldam, to the effect that, if they were not witches they might sink, and if they were witches they might float and be burnt. But I have lived long enough now to understand that both these anticipations were premature. As for war, I have long since made up my mind that it is not only a theatre of horrors, but a school of virtue; and that in a rich and various world, crowded with antagonistic tendencies and contrary interests, hostile collisions of various kinds must take place; and the only thing to be done with war, by sensible men, is not to dream it out of the world, but, while we are never eager for it, to be always ready, and, when we are in the heat of the strife, to fight like men, and not like tigers. As for Atheism, again, I have learnt equally, by the consideration of certain recent phases of thought, taken along with the general history of human speculation, that it is a disease of the speculative faculty which

must be expected to reappear from time to time, when men are shaken out of the firm forms of their old beliefs, and have not yet had time to work themselves into the well-defined mould of a new one. It indicates, in fact, a chaotic state of mind analogous to that physical chaos which makes its epiphany betwixt the destruction of an old world and the creation of a new.

What is Atheism? As a theory, with regard to the nature and constitution of the universe, the word means either that the mighty something, the To Tav, the all, was produced out of nothing, nobody knows how, and goes on producing itself into something, nobody knows how; or that it has existed for ever, and will exist for ever, as a mighty confused complex of something that acts, called force, and something that is acted on, called matter; but it takes its shape from no intelligent or designing cause, merely from blind chance; or at least that it is a self-existent combination of forces and the results of forces, of which, in their unity, no intelligible account can be given.

Now the first observation that occurs to one on this view of the constitution of this wonderful structure of things called the world, is, that on the broad view of the ages and cycles of human speculation it

is a strikingly exceptive, abnormal, and monstrous type of reasonable thought. It seems, on the first blush of the matter, to bear somewhat the same proportion to the general current of human thinking that dypsomania and other odd conditions of morbid sensibility do to the normal state of the human nerves. Or, to take another simile: the general aspect of the fields and the forests and the face of the earth, except in the desert of Sahara, is green ; but sometimes, wandering in the depths of the leafy dells, or through the luxuriant beds of artificial gardens, we stumble on a single plant whose leaves are red, while all its congeners are of the normal green. This peculiar hue, though it have a certain novel attraction about it, is in fact a disease, and will not be looked on with favour by any gardener. Such exactly seems to be the case with Atheism. It is a doctrine so averse from the general current of human sentiment, that the unsophisticated mass of mankind instinctively turn away from it, as the other foxes did from that vulpine brother who, having lost his tail in a trap, tried to convince the whole world of foxes that the bushy appendage in the posterior region was a deformity of which' all high-minded members of the vulpine aristocracy should get rid as soon as possible. In common