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CONTENTS.
CHAP.
PAGB
I. PRESUMPTIONS
I
II. THEISM, ITS REASONABLE GROUND
26
III. ATHEISM, ITS VARIETIES AND COMMON Roor. 37
IV. POLYTHEISM
72
V. BUDDHISM
IIO
VI. THE ATHEISM OF REACTION; MODERN ENG-
LISH ATHEISTS AND AGNOSTICS; MARTINEAU
AND TYNDALL
. 181
THE NATURAL HISTORY
OF ATHEISM.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
FOUR PHASES OF MORALS :
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1865-3
THE NATURAL HISTORY
OF ATHEISM
BY
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
PROFESSOR OF GREEK AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
UERRE
GENERAT
University of
MICHIGAN
"Mala et impia est consuetudo contra deos disputandi, sive ex animo id fit,
siye simulate.”-CICERO,
NEW YORK
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & COMPANY
1878
TROW's
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CHAPTER I.
PRESUMPTIONS.
Πάντες τε θεών χατέουσ’ άνθρωποι.
HESIOD.
Τίνος γάρ άλλου ζώου ψυχή θεών των τα μέγιστα και κάλλιστα
συνταξάντων ήσθηται ότι είσί; τί δε φύλον άλλοι και άνθρωποι θεούς
θεραπεύουσι. .
SOCRATES.
I
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 forever
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
2
The Natural History of Atheism.
I waded my way through that most interesting of
all ancient theological treatises, “ Cicero de Naturâ
Deorum,” and had finished the perusal with the
abiding belief that that culmination of all specula-
tive 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, hos-
tile 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 cer-
tain recent phases of thought, taken along with the
Presumptions.
3
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
TÒ Trâv, the all, was produced out of nothing, no-
body knows how, and goes on producing itself into
something, nobody knows how; or that it has ex-
isted forever, and will exist forever, 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 design-
ing 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 struc-
.
4
The Natural History of Atheism.
ture 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 think-
ing 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 unso-
phisticated 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
Presumptions.
5
of which all high-minded members of the vulpine
aristocracy should get rid as soon as possible. In
common times and under normal circumstances,
men are not disposed to accept Atheism, in any
shape, as having any positive value. It is simply
a defect in the reason, as much as the want of an
eyeball in what looks like an eye, or the want of a
beard in what looks like a man. Men without
beards, or women with them, will justly not be
taken account of in the general estimate of the
sexes.
The fact is, as Socrates says in the “Memorabilia,”
man is naturally and differentially a religious ani-
mal, and is not thoroughly or normally himself,
unless when he is so. It has been so much the
fashion lately to hunt out and to parade points of
identity between man and the lower animals, that it
may be a service to sound reason just to state the
immense gap that exist betwixt the strange un-
feathered biped called man and our first cousin the
ape, if Dr. Darwin and Mr. Huxley will have it so.
What monkey ever wrote an epic poem, or composed
a tragedy or a comedy, or even a sonnet ? " What
monkey professed his belief in any thirty-nine
articles, or well-compacted Calvinistic confession, or
gave in his adhesion to any Church, established or
6
The Natural History of Atheism.
disestablished ? Did any monkey ever smile or
laugh (for a grin is not a laugh), or sing, or give
the slightest indication of knowing even the most
elementary propositions in the first six books of
Euclid, such as are easily crammed into the head
of the dullest undergraduate of the term ? Plainly
not. And though men in Egypt, for some sym-
bolical reason that may not have been so foolish
as we imagine, paid certain sacrosanct attentions
and pious ministrations to crocodiles, there is no
proof that crocodiles or monkeys, or any other of
the lower animals, ever worshipped anybody. Dogs
worship men, you will say. Yes, but only in a
fashion. Dogs have neither churches nor creeds;
and as the god whom they worship is the man who
visibly feeds them and tangibly flogs them, it is a
very cheap sort of religion. Socrates was certainly
right in this matter, rather than Darwin. He saw
as great a gap betwixt man and the lower animals
in the descending scale, as betwixt men and the
gods in the ascending scale ; and he recognised the
peculiar differential excellence of the human species
simply in this, that they could recognise the gods,
and give evidence of the recognition by the re
tial observances of what we call a religion. Surely
this was a much more human, more normal, and
Presumptions.
7
more noble way of philosophizing than to take
infinite pains, as some of our modern scientific men
do, on the one hand, to restore our lost brotherhood
with the baboon, and, on the other, to raise up an
impassable wall of partition between all reasonable
creatures and the Supreme Reason from whom all
creatures flow. We miscalculate
We miscalculate very much indeed
if we imagine that the peculiar doctrines and
favourite fancies of a few cultivators of physical
science in this small corner of the world, and in this
small half of a century, are likely to exercise any
notable influence over the thoughts of men, after
the one-sided impulse out of which they arose shall
have spent its force. Not only all the unsophisti-
cated masses of men, but all the great originators of
philosophic schools and the founders of churches,
have been theists. Moses, David, and Solomon;
Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras; Socrates, Plato, Aris-
totle, and Zeno; St. Paul and St. Peter; Mahomet,
St. Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Kepler,
Copernicus, Shakespeare, Luther, Spinoza, Bacon,
Leibnitz, Newton, Locke; Des Cartes, Kant, Hegel.
Against such an array of great witnesses of sound
human reason, it is only the narrowness of local
conceit, or the madness of partisanship, that could
plant such names as David Hume (if David Hume
8
The Natural History of Atheism.
did indeed believe in his own bepuzzlements),
Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. As for
Confucius and Buddha, the two great prophets of
the far East, who certainly embrace a much wider
sphere of human discipleship than any of our Eng.
lish sophists of the negative school, they lie out-
side of our Western European culture altogether;
but in so far as they seem to have taught a morality
without religion, or a religion without God, we shall
say a word or two about them by-and-by.
That the general consent of the most cultivated
part of the human race, taken in the gross, is in
favour of theism, and against atheism, seems, there-
fore, as a fact, plain enough. But whether there
be certain races of human beings, up in the frozen
North, or down in the fervid South, the tablets of
whose inner nature, when nicely read, present abso-
lutely no traces of a recognition of a superior
world-controlling power, this is a question by no
means easy in an exhaustive way to answer. One
of the speakers in Cicero's book above-named,
starts precisely this question-"Whence," says he,
“ do you—i.e. the Stoics, who argue from the con-
sent of the human race-prove the opinions of all
nations ? . I verily believe that there are many peo-
ple so lost in savagery that they have not even the
Presumptions.
9
» * Here
slightest suspicion of the existence of gods.
are two contrary opinions: the one that there is a
universal consent of all men and all peoples in the be-
lief of a Supreme Being or Beings; the other, that
there are nations so sunk in savagery, that they en-
tertain not the remotest suspicion of God any more
than their cattle, their sheep, or their swine ; and to
make these adverse notions more than opinions, to
turn them into knowledge, as Plato is fond of
saying, it is manifest that what we want is facts.
Now the facts in this case are to be sought in remote
and little travelled places, under circumstances not
without danger, and, what is worse, often discour-
aging and disgusting to civilised men. Who is to
go and live among wild men of the woods and
roving Nomads of the waste for years, till he has
thoroughly mastered their language, and by this
process acquired the key to their notions and senti-
ments and convictions about whatever lies behind
and above and within that wonderful evolution of
beauty and grandeur and power, which we call the
world? We naturally look to Christian missionaries
here in the first place. They alone, with very few
exceptions, seem to possess the earnestness of pur-
* 66 De Naturâ Deorum," i. 23.
/*
IO
The Natural History of Atheism.
pose, the single-hearted devotedness, and the in-
tensity of moral apostleship, which could lead
-civilised men to make a moral experiment of this
kind. But even their evidence in such a matter
must be looked on with caution, and sifted with
care. An intense zeal-without which a missionary
would be nothing—so far from implying an impar-
tial judgment in all moral and religious matters,
not seldom renders such a judgment impossible.
We may say generally, indeed, that a zealous
Christian missionary is not the man fully to appre-
ciate the amount of genuine theistic piety that may
lie hidden and half choked beneath the grotesque
mummeries and disgusting practices that are all
that certain low types of humanity have to show
for religion. It is not at all uncommon, even
among ourselves, to hear persons and parties brand-
ed as atheistical, only because the individuals who
so stigmatize them have not been able, and, per-
haps, are not in the least willing, to appreciate the
sort of theism which they profess. If Spinoza has
been called an atheist, though he did not deny God,
but rather denied the world, and was, therefore, as
Hegel says, more properly styled an acosmist; how
much more may many savage tribes have been
termed atheistical by ignorant and unthinking mis-
Presumptions.
II
sionaries who failed to make the very obvious dis-
tinction between worshipping gods who are no
gods, and worshipping no god at all ? With this
caution, therefore, let us hear what the most intelli-
gent of the missionaries have to say; and in such a
case there are few men who have a better right to
be called into court than the noble apostle of South
Africa, Dr. Moffat. Here is a well-known passage
about the African Bushmen:-“Hard is the Bush-
man's lot-friendless, forsaken, an outcast from the
world; greatly preferring the conipany of the beasts
of prey to that of civilised man. His gorah * soothes
some solitary hours, although its sounds are often
responded to by the lion's roar or the hyena's howl.
He knows no God, knows nothing of eternity, yet
dreads death, and has no shrine at which to leave
his care and sorrows. We can scarcely conceive of
human beings descending lower in the scale of
ignorance and vice, while yet there can be no
question that they are children of one common
parent with ourselves.” † And to the same effect is
* “The gorah is an instrument something like the bow of a
violin-rather more curved—along which is stretched a catgut, to
which is attached a small piece of quill. The player takes the
quill in his mouth, and by strong inspirations and respirations pro-
duces a few soſt notes in the vibrations of the catgut.”
+ “Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa,” Thirtieth
thousand, p. 15.
12
The Natural History of Atheism.
the distinct testimony of Dr. Monat in reference to
the Andaman islanders :-"They have no concep-
tion of a Supreme Being. They have never risen
from the effects they see around them, even to the
most imperfect notion of a cause. They have never
ascended in thought from the works to a Creator, or
even to many Creators—that is to say, Polythe-
ism." * And one of the most eminent investigators
into the primitive condition of man has the follow-
ing interesting passage :-"The opinion that relig-
ion is general and universal has been entertained by
many high authorities. Yet it is opposed to the evi-
dence of numerous trustworthy observers. Sailors,
traders, and philosophers, Roman Catholic priests
and Protestant missionaries, in ancient and in mod-
ern times, in every part of the globe, have concurred
in stating that there are races of men altogether de-
void of religion. The case is the stronger because
in several instances the fact has greatly surprised
him who records it, and has been entirely in opposi-
tion to all his preconceived views. On the other
hand, it must be confessed that in some
travellers denied the existence of religion merely
because the tenets were unlike ours. The question
cases
* Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders.”
By Frederick T. Monat, M.D., F.R.C.S. London. 1863. P. 303.
Presumptions.
13
as to the general existence of religion among men
is indeed to a great extent a matter of definition.
If the mere sensation of fear, and the recognition
that there are probably other beings more power-
ful than one's self, are sufficient alone to constitute
a religion, then we must, I think, admit that reli-
gion is general to the human race. But when a
child dreads the darkness, or shrinks from a light-
less room, we never regard that as an evidence of
religion. Moreover, if this definition be adopted,
we cannot longer regard religion as peculiar to
man. We must admit that the feeling of a dog or
a horse towards his master is of the same charac-
ter; and the baying of a dog to the moon is as
much an act of worship as some ceremonies which
have been so described by travellers." *
But strong as these testimonies appear, it is ex-
tremely doubtful how far they would satisfy an im-
partial jury impannelled to try the point we are
now discussing. Certainly if anthropological ques-
tions of this kind are to be decided on the same
strictness of detailed testimony that pecuniary
cases are decided in our law courts, the three testi-
monies here given, notwithstanding the weight
“Origin of Civilisation and Primitive Condition of Man," By
Sir T. Lubbock. Pp. 138—9.
14
The Natural History of Atheism.
justly attributable to the words of the writers,
would require to be submitted to the most sifting
cross-examination before they could be accepted as
elements in the formation of any conclusive verdict
on the subject. And accordingly we find that
another writer of equal authority, after quoting
various testimonies in favour of the existence of
atheistic races, nevertheless declares his opinion
that no evidence sufficiently detailed and searching
has been brought forward, such as might enable a
cautious thinker to assert with confidence that
there exists anywhere a race of human beings
absolutely without religion of any kind.* And our
great African explorer, Livingstone, talking of
some of the most degraded tribes of the Africans
with whom he came into connection, says, " There
is no necessity for beginning to tell the most de-
graded of these people (the Bechuanas) of the ex-
istence of a God, or of the future state, the facts
being universally admitted. Everything that can-
not be accounted for by common causes is ascribed
to the Deity—as creation, sudden death, &c.
' How curiously God made these things !' is a
common expression, as is ‘He was not killed by
disease, he was killed by God.' And while speak-
Tylor, “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 379.
Presumptions.
15
ing of the departed—though there is nought in the
physical appearance of the dead to justify the ex-
pression—they say, 'He has gone to the gods,' the
phrase being identical with abiit ad patres."
This testimony is sufficiently strong, but of
course it is strong only within the range of per-
sonal observation which it includes, and does not
necessarily contradict the assertion of Moffat; for
Livingstone, in the very next page, honestly states
that “he had not had any intercourse with either
Caffre or Bushmen in their own tongue.” On the
whole, therefore, so far as our very imperfect evi-
dence goes, we seem justified in concluding that,
while some sort of religion seems to belong to man
as man, one type of religion may differ from
another as far as lust differs from love, opinion
from knowledge, or caricature from art.† And, if
there be races of reasonable beings who have no
idea of a cause, it is just the same thing as if we
were to find in every Alpine valley whole races of
Cretins, or anywhere in the world whole races of
idiots; they are defective creatures such as
no
*" Livingstone's Missionary Travels," chap. viii. p. 158.
+ An extremely interesting account of a very low type of religion,
among the Ostjaks of Asiatic Russia, will be found in Alexander
Castren's “ Reise Erinnerungen," Petersburg, 1853, p. 288.
16
The Natural History of Atheism.
naturalist would receive into his normal descrip-
tion of one of Nature's types ; such as roses, for
instance, without fragrance, horses without hoofs,
and birds without wings. Any type of things, in-
deed, as well as man, may by a combination of
untoward influences, be curtailed and stunted into
any sort of degradation.
So much for the facts. We return to our original
assertion, and say, The great majority of human
beings acknowledge God, and the practical form
which this acknowledgment takes is called Relig-
ion. But this, no doubt, is a very wide and a very
vague word, and requires exposition. In the
main, however, its variations fall under two heads.
Either it is a simple acknowledgment of an exist-
ing supreme authority in the universal order of
things both physical and moral ; or it contains
further a philosophical theory with regard to the
original creation and the continued preservation of
the universe. Of these two types of popular faith
the first is certainly the more important, affecting
as it does directly the conduct of human life, and
the position of personal subordination and respon-
sibility, which all faith in a divine government im-
plies ; but the philosophical element is always
included in the highest forms of religious belief. In
Presumptions.
17
this respect, indeed, religion is merely the popular
form of metaphysics. Metaphysics and theology,
in fact, in their ultimate issue are identical-meta-
physics being formally only the more general term
for the search into the ultimate ground of all Be-
ing, which search, in so far as it does not lose itself
in a self-puzzling scepticism, issues necessarily in
the assertion of the Eternal Reason, or Móryos,
which, in the well-known language of the Apostle
John, in the opening words of his Gospel, is only
another name for God.
It is a curious fact in the history of the human
mind that the most subtle and speculative and sci-
entific people of the ancient world—the Greeks—
inherited a religion utterly destitute of this philo-
sophical element, which is so prominent, not only in
our Christian religion, but in Brahmanism and
other superior forms of popular faith. There is not
in the whole breadth of the Homeric poems-and
Homer was virtually the Greek Bible—the slightest
indication of that great philosophical proposition
which stands written on the threshold of the Mosaic
Scriptures, “In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth." The old Smyrnean min-
strel indicates, indeed, in a familiar line, that the
gods of the Jovian dynasty had a father and a
18
The Natural History of Atheism.
mother, whom he distinctly names Ocean and
Tethys ; * but this fragment of an early theologic
speculation-for it is nothing better-bears on the
face of it that the existing gods, like the races of
men, were born; and any religion in which such
gods were supreme could not be said to contain a
metaphysics; for every metaphysics must ask not
only what is behind the show, but what is before
the first. To say that old Ocean and his briny
spouse were the father and mother of the gods was
nothing more than going another step back in a
celestial genealogy of which the origin was in the
dark. When you have traced back a pensile chain
a thousand links, you are no nearer to a philosophy
than when you started, unless you tell us to what
the first link is attached. The more current notion
among the Greeks was, that the existing dynasty
of gods of whom Jove was chief was preceded by
two dynasties—the first that of Kronos, whom the
Romans identified with Saturn, and the second
that of Uranus and Gee, or Heaven and Earth.
This implied, no doubt, a philosophical dualism,
though in a different style from the dualism of the
Good and Evil principle in the religion of the an-
* " Ocean the father of Gods immortal, and Tethys the mother.”
Il. xiv. 201.
Presumptions.
19
cient Persians, but still a sort of philosophy. But
whether we call this sort of theistic duality a
philosophy or not, it is certain that the theory
or the fancy was not a living, effective element in
the Greek religion. It was a sort of infantile
theology, which remained entirely outside of the
popular faith and the national worship ; not, as in
the creed of all Christian Churches, where a dog-
matic theology, or a positive theistic philosophy,
constitutes the solid basis and the firm framework
of the faith of the Church. Accordingly we find
that when the Baotian poet, Hesiod, who lived
some fifty or a hundred years later than Homer,
ventured in his capacity of theologer to trace the
celestial genealogy a step or two further back, he
fell plump into a mighty void, which showed how
little there was of deep, thoughtful piety, and how
much of superficial impression of the senses and
shallow sport of fancy, in what the subtle Greeks
had to content themselves with for a theology.
Hear how the book of the celestial generations
runs. Hexameters are apt to have rather an un-
graceful hop in English, but we may try them
here for a recreation:
“In the beginning was Chaos: and afterwards came into being
Earth broad-breasted, the stable upholder of starry Olympus;
20
The Natural History of Atheism.
Darksome Tartarus too, within the bosom of broad Earth;
Likewise Eros, the loveliest-born of all the Immortals,
Thrilling the limbs of men and of gods with gentle emotion,
Conquering counsel and wit in the charmed breast of the wisest.
Erebus, then, and black-stoled Night were children of Chaos;
Night was mother of Ether, and Day was daughter of Darkness,
And when Erebus mingled with Night in fruitful embracement,
Earth then brought into being the might of the starry Welkin
Like to herself, to spread his vasty curtain around her."
full ;
We have nothing here manifestly but a succes-
sion of appearances, which no man who meant
thinking could mistake for a philosophy of the
universe. To call Night the mother of Day, if
anything like causal connection be implied, is just
as absurd as to say that emptiness is the mother of
fulness. When I pour water into an empty tum-
bler, no doubt the tumbler was empty before it was
in the order of my sensations the emptiness
came before the fulness. That is all. In like man-
ner, when I take my dinner, hunger goes before
eating, and is in one sense the cause of my eating ;
but the cause of there being a dinner to eat is the
culinary care of the cook. So, if I build a house,
I may say, with Hesiod, In the beginning was the
chaos of stones called a quarry, and from that chaos
came the beautiful array of curiously co-ordinated
stones which I call my house. But everybody sees
that without the plan of the thoughtful architect
Presumptions.
21
and the skilful hand of the mason, the stones of the
quarry could never heap themselves into a house.
So it is with all order. To say that as a matter
of individual experience in any particular case
order proceeded out of disorder, explains nothing;
it only states the case to be explained. How did
the order come about ? This simple question the
theology of the Greeks seems never to have even
started. Their religion consisted simply in the
recognition of an established divine order of things
under supreme authority, with reverential submis-
sion of the will thereto.
We have now to answer a very natural question :
how far is this general consent of humanity a valid
argument for theism ?
If the old sage had any
reason for saying oi modoà Kakoi, the majority are
bad, might he not have equal or greater ground
for asserting the majority are fools ? Certainly a
mere majority taken by itself would be a very poor
argument for the truth of any proposition or for
the rectitude of any course of conduct; otherwise
all unlimited democracies would always be right,
whereas experience has proved that they are pecu-
liarly liable to go wrong. If the majority of per-
sons in any village were given to drunkenness,
this certainly would afford no argument in favour
22
The Natural History of Atheism.
of the beauty of intoxication. And, though men
often decide very serious matters by mere majori-
ties, is it not rather because they cannot do better
than because they have any firm faith that the
majorities will be right? If suits on the issue of
which many thousands of pounds depend are con-
stantly decided by a majority of judges in the
Scottish Court of Session, how often has the deci-
sion of that majority been reversed by the decision
of a single judge in the English House of Lords ?
And naturally enough too; for one strong head
will always be better than twenty weak heads; and
turning the scores into hundreds would only multi-
ply the confusion. And if, looking into the general
administration of human affairs in any small town
or large city, you should happen to have your eye
fastened by any great improvement which has re-
cently been made—such as, for example, the win-
ning of land from the sea, and turning a useless,
slimy beach into a beautiful, breezy, green espla-
nade, as has been done at Rothesay in Bute, or
opening up a free prospect and a healthy ventila-
tion-you will find that it was not the majority at
all who did or desired these changes, but that some
one man of large views and strong will had forced
them, in spite of the indifference of the great ma-
Presumptions.
23
jority and the violent hostility of a few. In what
sense, then, shall we say that the consent of a ma-
jority supplies a test, or affords even a presump-
tion of what is right ? Plainly not in cases where
any very extensive knowledge or subtle views are
required ; nor in cases where a man can claim no
right to have an opinion at all, except after special
study, and with professional training; as little in
cases where the general judgment has been obscur-
ed, and cool discrimination been rendered impossi-
ble by the hot smoke and steaming mists of faction,
ecclesiastical or civil. Nevertheless there is a pre-
ponderant rightness in the sentiment of the multi-
tude, even in their judgments of important public
matters, which every one feels in practice, and
which even the cool Aristotle defends and illus-
trates at considerable length in his estimate of the
value of democratic forms of government, as op-
posed to oligarchic. * Perhaps we shall hit the
mark here, if we say broadly that, as nature is
always right, the general and normal sentiment of
the majority must always be right, in so far as it is
rooted in the universal and abiding instincts of
humanity; and public opinion, as the opinion of
* Pol. III. II.
24
The Natural History of Atheism.
the majority, will be right also in all matters which
belong to the general conduct of life among all
classes, and with respect to which the mind of the
majority has been allowed a perfectly free, natural,
and healthy exercise. And there will always be a
presumption against practices, sentiments, and opin-
ions which run flat in the teeth of universal prac-
tice and the unvaried tradition of humanity. It
affords a presumption against total abstinence, for
instance, as a philosophy of life (for its utility as a
special vigorous remedy against a special severe
malady may well be admitted), that men of all
classes in all ages have been fond of a glass of wine:
in like manner it affords a presumption against the
Quakers that men of all nations and in all centuries
have fought great battles with their neighbours,
and become great and strong by the fighting of
great battles ; and, again, it affords a strong pre-
sumption against the notion of dispensing with
lawyers, clergymen, physicians, and all professional
men —a favourite panacea with some—that in all
ages and in all countries such types of the social
man have grown up, and found grateful recognition
from the majority. And, though the majority of
mankind are not philosophers, yet in all matters
where nature rules, there is a wisdom in them that
Presumptions.
25
justly maintains its ground against the subtle specu-
lations of abstract thinkers who excite attention by
confounding things which are naturally distinct,
and denying things which the constitution of our
nature forces us imperiously to assert.
If a glib
creature, for instance, calling himself, or being
called, a philosopher, should maintain that beauty
depends on utility and fitness, you may safely let
him spin as many chapters as he may choose in
illustration of such a perverse paradox, when every-
body knows that the ugliest possible bridge (which
the railway companies frequently make) is as useful
for its end, and as fit for its purpose, as the most
ornamental structure ever devised. The systems
of subtle thinkers, in fact, always require to be
watched with particular caution : clever people are
peculiarly apt to love the fancies of their own be-
getting, more than the facts of God's creation :
though clever, they are not necessarily wise ; and,
like Narcissus, will be found sometimes glassing
themselves. complacently in their own real or im-
agined perfections, which are very far from ex-
hausting the sum-total of plastic forces in the uni-
verse.
2
CHAPTER II.
REASONABLE GROUND OF THEISM.
"Έστι δή μεν προς γονείς φιλία τέκνοις και ανθρώπους προς θεούς, ,
ως προς αγαθών και υπερέχον' ευ γαρ πεποιήκασι τα μέγιστα του γάρ
είναι και τραφήναι αίτιοι, και γένομένοις του παιδευθήναι.
'Ανάγκη είναι αΐδιον τινά ουσιών ακίνητον. Φαμέν δε τον θεόν
είναι ζώον αίδιον, άριστον.
ARISTOTLE.
INC
NGENIOUS novelties of the kind we referred
to at the close of last chapter, whether pro-
pounded by the logician, or naturalist, by positive
philosophers like Plato, or negative philosophers
like David Hume, may make men stare for a day,
and talk for a century, but they will never stand
against Nature. “Opinionum commenta delet
dies, Nature judicia confirmat," said the great
master of old Roman eloquence, and the eloquent
expounder of old Roman sense.
Babels of transcendental or paradoxical speculation
as high as you please, if they have no root in the
Build up your
Reasonable Ground of Theism.
27
fundamental facts of Nature, they are only so
much paper; card castles which will fall to the
ground easily enough, when the wind changes and
the whiff comes. And of these Babels which the
perverse ingenuity of men has piled up, there is
none against which the verdict of the majority
and the loud protest of Nature will more certain-
ly prevail than atheism. Theologians, no doubt
sometimes with a shallow impertinence, and a pre-
sumptuous dogmatism, may have propounded
many things about the character, attributes, and
administrative procedure of the Supreme Reason,
in protesting against which atheists may justly put
in a claim for modesty and wisdom ; but when
they go beyond this, and instead of the arbitrary
dogmas of certain ecclesiastical councils, go to war
with the deep-rooted instincts of humanity, they
can no more hope to maintain their ground than a
little smoke and mist in some muddled locality can
obscure permanently the glorious sun in the firma-
ment. For that feeling of reverential dependence
of the finite derived reason on the infinite unde-
rived reason (the Móryos of John i. 1) is so rooted
in all sound reasonable existence that it requires
rather a perverse ingenuity to give the opposite
thesis—that is all sorts of atheism--the semblance
28
The Natural History of Atheism.
of truth than any peculiar perspicacity to perceive
that it is false. If the majority, as Aristotle
argues—though there are many fools amongst
them, and though they do not a few foolish and
mad things occasionally-are nevertheless upon
the whole entitled to have a voice in the difficult
conduct of public affairs, much more are they en-
titled, by the primary postulates of all reasonable
nature, to protest against such a hollow absurdity
as atheism. For the maintenance of the atheistic
theory necessarily implies one of three things :
either that effects can be produced without a
cause ; or that a system of reasonable effects can
be produced without a reasonable cause ; or that
the system of effects which we call the world is
essentially unreasonable, and therefore does not
proceed from a reasonable source. Now of these
three atheistic propositions, the negative of the
first is of the nature of a postulate to all sane
minds; and the wretched cavil about invariable
sequence which David Hume introduced, and John
Stuart Mill made fashionable for a day, will no
more do away with the idea of causality in the
great mass of normally constituted minds, than the
assertion that the regular going up and down of a
piston in a cylinder renders the supposition of a
Reasonable Ground of Theism.
29
constructive reason in the person of a James Watt
superfluous in order to explain the existence of a
steam-engine. If physical science can put its
fingers on nothing but a series of sequences, it
merely proves that science is not philosophy, and
is altogether a subordinate affair; but when philo-
sophers, with their most acute spectacles, can see
nothing in the world but an infinite series of
invariable sequences, the sooner they give up their
profession of wisdom the better; for it is just the
invariability of the sequences which forces the
reasonable mind of man to assert that there is a
cause within them, or behind them, which makes
the invariability possible. As to the second propo-
sition, that a series of reasonable effects can be
produced without a reasonable cause, any sane
man—and the more ignorant the better for our
present argument--will answer without hesitation,
as Cicero did, that when a box of letters, such as
are used to teach children the alphabet, shall have
tumbled themselves into a well-reasoned treatise,
he will believe such proposition, not sooner.
The
third proposition, the real stronghold of all prac-
tical atheism, though at bottom equally untenable,
admits of being dressed out in some sentences of
plausible pleading, and therefore must be more
30
The Natural History of Atheism.
seriously looked at. The pious theist founds his
faith on the wonderful order and beauty, and the
exceeding cunning displayed in the architecture of
the universe. The most obvious and ready way
for the atheist to contravene this argument is to
bring into the foreground the contrary of this ;
and to assert roundly that there is really as much
disorder as order in the universe. Of course, for
this form of argumentation there are materials at
hand of a very formidable look not far to fetch :
Neapolitan and Icelandic volcanoes ; Lisbon
earthquakes; inundations of the Garonne at Tou-
louse, or of the Dee at Aberdeen ; storms, squalls,
cyclones, shipwrecks, conflagrations, conspiracies,
murders, massacres, idiocies, madness, and all
sorts of evil and foolish things which make a
prominent figure in the newspapers. But, before
we talk on these subjects in a perplexed or, what
is worse, in an inculpatory humour, let us consider
calmly what our position in this vast universe
really is. It is pretty much like the position of a
single ant-hill in a vast forest. If you happen to
be walking through some pine forest, as at Avie-
more or Braemar, with your head very high, and
full of fine fancies, let us imagine, you come
roughly, with your heel, booted and spurred per-
Reasonable Ground of Theism.
31
haps, plump into the middle of that metropolis of
straws; then what happens ? the architecture of
laborious weeks is destroyed in a moment, and
some scores of those active little intelligences
called ants squelched out of existence, at a stroke.
Now, suppose one of the ants who had not been
squelched, with a particularly sensitive brain, and
a great amount of self-importance, being able to
make theories like human philosophers, should
excogitate a treatise or a tissue of imaginations
that might make a treatise to the effect—My beau-
tiful architecture has been destroyed : therefore,
either there is no God, or a God who delights in
mischief. What think you of this logic? If it is
just, then let us all become atheists to-morrow; if
it is ridiculous, let us hear nothing more of such
nonsense. The real fact is, that in a vast and
varied world heaving and swelling, and ramping
everywhere, so to speak, with the most eager
vitality, collisions and confusions of vital forces
will constantly be occurring, which may produce a
certain ainount of discomfort to individual exist-
ences, or even blow them out altogether, but
which prove no more the disorder of the universe,
than a skit of a boy's squirt can put out the sun.
In some parts of the west of Scotland, from the
32
The Natural History of Atheism.
peculiar configuration of the richly varied coast-
line, two opposite tides come in, and where they
meet make a jabble which disturbs the serenity
sometimes of nervous ladies in pleasure-boats.
Is there therefore no certain and regular flow in the
tides, but only a universal jabble? The whole
system of the world, from the wheeling planets in
the sky to the little brown ant-hill, or the grey-
crusted lichen on the crag, exists in, by, and
through a reasoned order : the disorder belongs
not to the existence of any one thing, but to points
of occasional disturbance arising naturally out of
the coexistence of many things. Who can look
nakedly on such logic as this, without smiling-
“ I have the toothache ; therefore there is no God.”
This is the way a clever French writer puts the
absurdity of this plea for atheism. It is the pro-
duct of narrowness of view, and selfishness of
feeling Let Dr. Paley's answer suffice for all
such vain talkers :-" The teeth do ache some-
times, but they were manifestly not made for ach-
ing."
On the subject of EVIL generally, a great deal
of impertinent stuff has been talked—not seldom
by very pious people, who forget, in the first
place, to tell us what Good is; and, in the second
Reasonable Ground of Theism.
33
place, fail to show us how much of what is good
and best in the world could possibly have been
produced without the existence of many forms of
what is commonly called EVIL. Sir William
Hamilton, in one of his chapters, defines pleasure
unhindered energy. Very well ; this is a sort of
pleasure which may suit some persons, or many
persons. But there are others—not a few—who
will say that they prefer the pleasure which arises,
not from the absence, but from the presence, of
hindrances. Their notion of happiness is to strug-
gle with difficulties, not to evade them. What, it
may well be asked, is the use of energy, if not to
struggle with difficulty ? But difficulty is only
another name for what lazy people call evil ; as
when virtue is described as an up-hill work, and
vice as a prone descent. If virtue were as easy as
vice, virtue would cease to be virtue; in other
words, in a world where there was no evil there
could be no good—at least, no good of the highest
kind. If there were no ignorance, how could
there be the greedy delight of opening up from
ignorance into knowledge? If all men instinctively
knew everything, where were the pleasant relation
of teacher and taught? If there were no poverty,
where were charity ? If every person were equally
2*
34
The Natural History of Atheism.
independent and self-reliant, where would be the
gracious pleasure on both sides, which arises from
the support given by the strong to the weak ?
Where, again, would be the topping virtue of
moral courage, unless the majority, at some par-
ticular critical moment, were cowards ? Where
would be the skill of the pilot, unless there were
squalls and unexpected blasts, by which people
might possibly be drowned? Where the science of
a surgeon, if legs were made of stuff that could not
possibly break? And if the garden, left to itself,
grew not nettles and thistles and hawkweed and
dock, but only roses and potatoes and peas, where
were the work of the gardener ? In fact, always
and everywhere the development of energy implies
the existence of that which energy must subdue,
namely, evil in some shape or other. Therefore
the existence of evil is not a proof that there is
no God; but it is by the overcoming of evil con-
stantly that God proves Himself to be God, and
man proves himself to be God-like, when, in his
subordinate sphere, he does the same. The only
real evil in the world is the negative, carping
spirit, the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust,
which, for lack of will to use the given mate-
rials in the given way, gratifies an unreasoning
Reasonable Ground of Theism.
35
restlessness in blaming everything and doing
nothing
These are only a few of the considerations
which might be adduced to show how unmeaning
are the objections which the atheist brings against
the grand and beautiful order of breathing things
which we call the world. From our human posi-
tion and partial point of view the laws of order
are not always equally comprehensible ; but Dis-
order is nowhere. If it were to exist at all, the
world would very soon cease to be a world; con-
secutive reason would dissolve into a general
babblement of Bedlam; and nothing would remain
but a blind weaving and unweaving of a tissue of
unintelligent and unintelligible forces. So far is
this, however, from being the actual state of
things, that the more we penetrate into the hidden
workings of Nature, the more we discover that the
superficial multiplicity of outward movements is
governed by a higher Unity, which pervades and
controls all ; and this principle is simply God, in
whom, as St. Paul says, you and I and all things
live and move and have their being. As in a
mighty host of hundreds and thousands of men
encamped on a battle-field of many miles in ex-
tent, movements are constantly taking place which
36 The Natural History of Atheism.
are unintelligible to the private soldier in the
position which he occupies, but which all shoot
out from the directing mind of the great Napoleon
or Moltke of the struggle as clearly and as
efficiently as the divergent radiation of the sun;
so, most certainly, all the multiplicity of apparent-
ly, tangled movements in the living machinery of
the world, is the manifestation of that self-exist-
ent, self-energizing, all-present, all-controlling, all-
moulding, reasonable Unity, whom we justly call
GOD. Any other theory of the world is either
nonentity or nonsense.
CHAPTER III.
ATHEISM; ITS SPECIFIC VARIETIES AND COM-
MON ROOT.
"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God."
PSALMS OF DAVID.
"Of such doctrine never was there school
But the heart of the fool,
And no man therein Doctor but himself.”
MILTON.
H
AVING in the previous chapter statéd, in
a few broad lines, the general basis of the
theistic creed, I shall now attempt to lay bare the
pathology of that most strange disease of the
speculative faculty which we call ATHEISM. The
history of error is the necessary and most instruc-
tive complement of the theory of truth.
And in endeavouring to set forth the causes of
this monstrous disease of the reasoning faculty, we
shall commence with the simplest conceivable,
viz., such absolute feebleness or babyhood of in-
38 The Natural History of Atheism.
tellect as has not yet reached to the conception
of a cause at alt
. Travellers and anthropological
writers tell us of savage tribes whose faculty of
discriminating multitude has not reached beyond
the number five. Some men, even of well-culti-
vated minds, but unused to figures, can scarcely
perform a simple arithmetical operation without
confounding addition and subtraction; and, if so,
there may, of course, be creatures so imperfectly
emerged from the original monkey-germ of hu-
manity (to speak for a moment with Darwin), and
so totally engrossed with putting into some sort
of order the multitude of sensuous impressions
now being raised into ideas, that the notion of
cause has never arisen in their minds. Each in-
dividual amongst us remembers a period when
curious observation and recognition of individual
sensuous impressions formed the sole occupation
of budding intellect; and we have only to imagine
the growth of the reasoning faculties suddenly
stopped in incipient boyhood, in order to realise
the notion of a human being incapable of the
idea of God. Stunted individuals of all kinds,
and stunted races may exist just as trees trying to
grow in the Western Hebrides are blasted down
to the stature of gooseberry bushes. Atheists,
Its Varieties and their Root.
39
therefore, wherever they may be the natural pro-
duct of stunted and half-developed intellect, we
shall set down in the lowest stage, and call them
Atheists of imbecility. But, as we do not go out
of our way to see oak trees not bigger than goose-
berry bushes, so we need not detain ourselves
with this type of intellectual incapables. It is not
Atheists of this class that we are likely to meet
with in the present age; and if we did meet with
them, we should be much more likely to remit
them summarily to some hospital of incurables,
than to a thinking school where they might be
gradually trained up to a comprehension of Leib-
nitz, and Butler, and Dr. Paley. It is not defect
of intellect in ages of civilisation, but perversity,
that is the main cause of Atheism.
The next type of the atheistic disease which
demands notice has its origin not so much in an
intellectual feebleness, as in a moral disorder of
the reasonable creature. We may have met some-
times in life, or at all events in the columns of
newspapers, with persons of a certain irregular,
disorderly, distempered habit of mind with a life
and character correspondent. The career of these
people is like a piece of music made up of a con-
stant succession of jars which shakes the strings so
40
The Natural History of Atheism.
much by unkindly vibrations, that the instrument,
from the force of an unnatural strain, cracks itself
into silence prematurely. Now unharmonized
characters of this description are naturally indis-
posed, and practically incapacitated, from recog-
nising order, design, and system in the constitu-
tion of the universe ; and of course cannot see
God. We find, indeed, always in the world only
what we bring with us, a capacity of finding. An
ass that delights in its own braying, as it is to be
presumed all asses do, cannot be expected to find
delight in the symphonies of Beethoven; a gam-
bler who has been long accustomed to feed his
emotional nature on the irrational stimulus afforded
by the blind throw of the dice, loses the capacity
of extracting pleasure from the normal exercise of
reason; and a drunkard who has destroyed the
tone of his stomach by the constant irritation of
strong liquors, will turn away from the simplicity
of Nature's most healthy beverage as from a poi-
It could serve no good purpose to parade
in these pages flaming examples of the terrible
pranks played by disorderly characters in high
places, who showed by their whole conduct that
they regarded neither God nor man, but delighted
in the production of sheer chaos for the triumph
son.
Its Varieties and their Root.
41
of a grossly selfish energy. The biography of
Jack Sheppard may be a very profitable study for
young thieves, but honest men will furnish the
picture galleries of their brain not with such
por-
traits. Nevertheless, it occurs to me to set down
here the features of one of the most notable of
those disorderly characters who lived in ancient
Rome at that same epoch when the hollow atheism
of Epicurus was dressed up for a day in the garb
of poetical beauty by a poet of no mean genius
called Lucretius. The man I mean is Catiline.
Hear how Sallust in a well-known passage de-
scribes him: “Lucius Catiline, born of a noble
family, a man of great strength, both of mind and
body, but of a wicked and perverse disposition.
To this man, from his youth upwards, intestine
broils, slaughters, rapines, and civil wars were a
delight; and in these he put forth all the energy
of his youth. He could boast a bodily frame
capable of enduring heat and cold, hunger and
watching, beyond all belief; he had a spirit daring,
cunning, and full of shifts, ready alike to simulate
what he was not, and to dissimulate what he was,
as occasion might call. Greedy of others' prop-
erty, he was lavish of his own; in passion fiery ;
in words copious; in wisdom scant. His unchas-
42
The Natural History of Atheism.
tened ambition was constantly desiring things im-
moderate, incredible, and beyond human reach."
This is exactly the sort of character, to whose
completeness, if anything like a philosophy is to be
attributed, atheism will be that thing. For how
can the man who delights in turning the social
order into chaos cherish the belief that the world
is a physical system, moulded and maintained by a
spirit of which the essential function is to create
order out of confusion, not the contrary? The
man, whoever he be, that sets Rome or Paris on
fire, is an atheist, and one of the worst type ; he
not only denies in a speculative way the fair order
of the universe, but he actually employs himself
systematically in creating disorder. And what
does the Roman historian say about the character
of the age which produced this sort of monster?
Was it remarkable for religion, for piety? Not
at all. Hear the words: “When the Romans, ,
who had grown great by labour and righteousness,
at length saw all nations subdued, and the world,
both sea and land, at their feet, then Fortune be-
gan to rage and to confound all things. That
very people, who had found it an easy thing to
endure any sort of difficulty and danger, found
ease and wealth, a blessing to the wise, the source
Its Varieties and their Root.
43
of misery and ruin. First, greed of money, and
then lust of power, grew rampant: here was the
fuel which fed the flame of all evils. For the
greed of money and the haste to be rich sapped
the foundations of all faith, probity, and good
morals : instead of the old virtues, the desire of
wealth taught men insolence, harshness, the neg-
lect of the gods, and general venality; while the
love of power forced many men to be false, having
one thing in their breast, and another thing on
their tongue : friendships were cultivated, not
from genuine love, but from some consideration
of external advantage ; and men were more anx-
ious to show a fair face 'than to keep a clean
breast."
In this striking passage the writer shows us by
a terrible example from real life, how true the
doctrine of St. Paul is, which, in that awful sum-
mation of heathen vice, in the first chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans, identifies atheism and im-
morality as growing out of one common root; not,
of course, meaning that all atheists are immoral
(for this, as we well know, is contrary to the fact),
but that certain epochs of gross social disorder and
contempt of all moral restrictions are in their
nature always atheistic. “ And as they did not
44
The Natural History of Atheism.
like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave
them up to a reprobate mind, to do things which
are not seemly, being filled with all unrighteous-
ness, wickedness, avariciousness, full of envy, mur-
der, strife, guile, evil habitude, being whisperers,
slanderers, haters of God, haughty, insolent,
boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to
parents, senseless, faithless, without natural affec-
tion, merciless." For, in fact, the moment the
binding power of the great cause of cosmic unity,
which we justly call God, is lost sight of, the mul-
titudinous units of human society can no more
hold themselves together than the stones of an arch
when the key-stone is shaken out. Without this
controlling unity to create an organic subordina-
tion of part to part, a congregation of human
beings naturally resolves into a series of explosions
of fitful individualism, which ends in Chaos. That
which saves the cosmos at any assignable moment
from reeling back into chaos is simply the unity
of the self-existent divine reason, controlling the
physical world in the first place by what we call
laws of nature, and the moral world by what we
call the principles of right conduct. Fundamen-
tally both are one ; deny the radical unity of laws
of nature in the divine Móyos and you can have no
It's Varieties and their Root.
45
reason to admit a controlling unity of reasonable
plan in a well-ordered life, or a well-governed
state.
So much for the outstanding extreme types of
godless humanity—the atheistic incapable and the
atheistic monster. Let us now descend a little
into the arena of common modern life, and see
what symptoms of the morbid atheistic pathology
we may discover there. Now as nettles are seen
growing abundantly always where human habita-
tions have been, and every weed has its favourite
soil, out of which it seems to spring spontaneously,
so all the varieties of speculative and practical
atheism which we meet with in common life are
weeds sprung from the rank soil of irreverence.
As a man cannot eat without an appetite, though
all the fruitage of Paradise be spread before him,
or as a man with no love in his constitution will see
a whole army of Aphrodites marched out without
emotion, so neither can gods expect acknowledg-
ment from the sort of creature in whom all rever-
ence for superior excellence is non-existent. Rev-
erence implies a certain inferiority, and certain or-
gans by which the inferior lays hold of the superior,
and thereby achieves the pleasant feeling of eleva-
tion. But how shall a climbing plant attach itself
46 The Natural History of Atheism.
to the lofty wall, if you cut off its tendrils ? So there
are human souls that seem to have no tendrils, or
whose tendrils have been frosted or nipped off, and
thus they remain without any bond of attachment to
their natural support. These are the men whom
St. Paul, who knew the heathen world well, desig-
nates as ňocot, or without God in the world (Eph.
ii. 12). They drift about in a whirl of unconse-
crated passion, or get trampled in the mire, or,
what is even more sad, prop themselves up in vari-
ous absurd ways, boasting that they can do with-
out tendrils, and that only a weakling will cling by
the old wall. This want of reverence, which is the
natural soil of atheism, may, in some cases, be con-
genital, like a lack of taste for music, or an inca-
pacity of understanding a mathematical proposi-
tion. Some human beings seem shut up in a
certain narrow self-containment; to such the rec-
ognition of anything beyond their own shell is
impossible; for no person expects a lobster to come
crawling 'up to you, and look in your face with the
affectionate worship of a dog. Man is, however,
naturally not only a weak creature, but a creature
who, on only too many occasions, is made sharply
to feel his weakness; in his normal state, therefore,
he will naturally put forth feelers towards that
Its Varieties and their Root.
47
which is above and beyond him, and that which he
seeks to lay hold of for his sustainment, even in the
most blind and groping way, he will justly call
God. This lowest and simplest form of religion,
the mere feeling of dependence on a superior
Being, however inadequate, and however far from
the sublime of intelligent piety, is nevertheless
quite natural; whereas atheism, in a mere piece of
ephemeral dependency, such as the strongest man
is, must always remain an absurdity and a mon-
strosity. We shall say, therefore, that man, being
naturally a religious animal, atheism can then only
spring up when, in the individual or in society, any
influence arises which nips the natural bud of
reverence in the soul, and perhaps not only deprives
this emotion of its healthy nourishment, but fur-
nishes a plenteous supply of fuel to a feeling of
isolated self-sustainment. Under this category
falls naturally every exercise of strength, power, or
force which may inspire the agent with a strong
feeling of independence, and incline him, in the
pride of the moment, stoutly to disown his depend-
ence on any superior power. Of course in such
a creature as man this sort of feeling is mere mad-
ness; for the point of a bare bodkin may give a
quietus to the earth-shaking bulk of a mammoth as
48 The Natural History of Atheism.
readily as to the minute machinery of a wren.
Nevertheless, experience shows amply that this
feeling of self-sufficiency, partly natural and partly
formed by a favourable circumstance, may grow up
to extraordinary dimensions, and teach the petty
personality, so intoxicated with his own imagined
self-importance, to play a farce of fantastic tricks
before high Heaven, which makes men laugh and
angels weep.
Ancient story, both sacred and
profane, is full of instances of this kind; indeed,
the wise Greeks, no less than the religious Hebrews,
seem to have been possessed with nothing so much
as with a sacred fear of the consequences that
follow to poor humanity when a just self-esteem
grows up into a false self-importance, and a false
self-importance is exaggerated into a monstrous
self-worship. Hence the frequent repetition of the
wise warnings to persons in lofty positions to re-
member that they are mortal ; and the popular
image brought before the imperial absoluteness of
the Eastern monarch in Herodotus,* or by Horace,
in one of his familiar odes, that the lightnings
of Jove love to strike the topmost towers. A man
is never in greater danger than when, from what-
ever cause, his spirit, to use the Scripture language,
History, vii. 10.
Its Varieties and their Root.
49
is “ lifted up," and in the full-blown sense of
prosperous power, he forgets how he is girt round
with mortal weakness, and conceits himself that he
can even cope with the gods. “Is not this great
Babylon that I have built for the honour of the
kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the
honour of my majesty ?" says the Chaldean
monarch in the Book of Daniel; and we know
what happened. A man is never nearer being a
beast than when he imagines himself a god. The
sentiment which lies at the bottom of all such
self-
magnification is radically atheistic, essentially
monstrous, an inversion of the order of nature-as
great as if a man should say that 3-2 is equal to
3+2.
“ Demens qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen,
Aere et cornipedum pulsu simularat equorum.
“ Fool, who Jove's thunder and immortal holt
Would ape with brass and tramp of hoofèd steeds."
Now of this rebellious strength and insolent
usurpation of the throne of the superior by the
inferior, the lowest form, of course, is when mere
animal strength, planting itself above the intellec-
* Virgil, Æneid, vi. 590.
3
50 The Natural History of Atheism.
tual and moral, assumes the reins of government,
either in the celestial world or the terrestrial. Of
. this type of atheism the Giants and others in
Greek mythology are a prominent example; the
signification of which the reflective Roman lyrist
saw clearly. “We know," he says, in one of the
most beautiful of those wise and weighty odes which
commence the third book- We know how the
impious Titans, the monstrous troop, were hurled
into Tartarus by the swooping bolt of Him who
alone controls with righteous sway the sluggish
land, the windy sea, and the dusky realms of the
dead beneath the earth ; " for how can it be other-
wise, since everywhere in heaven and on earth-
" Vis consili expers mole ruit suâ;
Vim temperatam Di puoque provehunt
In majus : idem odere vires
Omne nefas animo moventes,
*
'Strength without counsel falls by its own weight,
But tempered force grows strong and stronger still,
By grace of gods who wisely do abate
The insolent thought and the rebellious will.”
And in the same way Homer always characterises
his Cyclops, Laestrygons, and other savage and
* Hor. Lib. iii. Carm. iv. 65.
Its Varieties and their Root.
51
cannibal tribes from whom the ill-starred fellow-
sailors of Ulysses find cruel fate as not only inhu-
man and lawless, but utterly destitute of any
notion of religion (où8è Deovońs, Od. ix.). But
it is the intoxication of absolute power in the
government of men, more than mere brute
strength, that chiefly inclines a mortal man to for-
get his human limitations and imagine that he can
defy the gods, or, what is the same thing, set at
nought the eternal constitution of things, by bow-
ing to no superior. “I will take the city, whether
Jove wills or wills not !” cried Capaneus, in the
pride of assault against the seven-gated Thebes ;
and the intoxication of self-will, and the madness
of self-worship which inspired this famous old sen-
tence, stirs even now the breast of a great Napo-
leon, dreaming of absorbing vast Europe, or a
little Napoleon, scheming in the way of his smaller
ambition, for a Rhine boundary. There is an un-
mistakeable germ of Atheism at the root of all
pride.
But it is not only uncontradicted lordship that
tends to run into godlessness; unlimited liberty
also has its freaks. There is an atheism of demo-
cracy, no less than of despotism. Every extreme
of self-assertion, or, as the Brahmans would ex-
52
The Natural History of Atheism.
press it, the attempt to make an independent I,
whether by violently overriding every other body,
or by asserting an absolute independence for each
individual, is a rebellion against the firm concate-
nation of closely subordinated units of which the
social framework is composed. From extreme
democracy, as from a hotbed, atheism in its rank-
est stage naturally shoots up. And, accordingly,
whether it be in the subtle disputations of ancient
glib-tongued Athens, or on the fiery rim of mod-
ern French revolutionary craters, or on the more
innocent platform of London East-End Sabbath-
evening orations, this hideous monstrosity parades
itself with observation. How, indeed, should it
be otherwise? There is nothing in the idea of
mere liberty to create the feeling of reverence;
the desire of unlimited liberty is an essentially
selfish feeling, and has no regard for any Power
from above, that might impose silence on each
windy self-proclaimer. The fundamental maxim
of all pure democracy is simply this—" I am as
good as you, and perhaps a little better ; I ac-
knowledge nobody as my master, whether in
heaven above or on earth beneath ; I will not be.
fettered.” This natural connection between de-
mocracy and irreverence it was that caused Plato
Its Varieties and their Root.
53
to make the observation, that even the dogs in
Athens had a certain look of impertinence about
them which was not observed in Sparta. * And
Aristophanes, that large-viewed spectator of the
strange and troubled times in which he lived, in his
wise burlesque, called The Clouds, introduces a de-
mocratic and sophist-trained young Hopeful, cun-
ningly arguing himself free from all the restraints
of filial duty, and making disobedience to parents
one of the household liberties which unfettered de-
mocracy was to achieve. Quite consistently too.
The insubordinate and rebellious instinct which
denies God in heaven, and the king upon the
throne, cannot long tolerate the restraints imposed
by the natural authority of the father, and the
rules of domestic discipline. There is, indeed, no
cry more false, more delusive, more contrary to
the eternal nature of things, than that which mod-
ern democracy has chosen for its favourite watch-
word-Liberty. No doubt the word has a mean-
ing, and a mighty one, when opposed to all unnat-
ural restrictions of the healthy development of
any creature; the instinct of individual self-asser-
tion that makes a slave burst his bonds, or a cap-
* Republic.
54
The Natural History of Atheism.
tive escape from his prison, will always secure
sympathy. But beyond this, in the organization
of social life, liberty has very little to do. On the
contrary, the whole history of civilisation is a
record of successive limitations of liberty, which
we call laws. An old Scythian nomad, or modern
gipsy, encamped on a Highland moor, and warm-
ing himself with the scattered spoils of the old
pine forest, is a much more free man than any
modern citizen of the most free country in Europe.
The civilised man grows, not by a large irregular
liberty, but by the wise limitation of his range
and the fruitful husbandry of his resources. The
first condition of all effective social organization is
discipline; but discipline implies subordination ;
and subordination means the recognition of a
supreme authority. Destroy all reverence for
such authority, and you produce that feverish,
troubled, chaotic state of society which spends its
force in continual convulsions and revolutions ;
while in the individual mind you beget that
wanton revelling in the idea of unféttered individ-
ualism which wastes itself in noisy explosions
against every power that would tame the fury or
prune the rampancy of an imperious I.
But unlimited power and unlimited liberty are
Its Varieties and their Root.
55
not the only social forces that are apt to run riot
in the exaggerated assertion of the individual, and
the negation of all superhuman authority. There
is the irreverence begotten of the pride of intellect.
In the exercise of intellectual, as of moral or phy-
sical power, there is apt to arise a certain selfish
satisfaction in the exclusive dominancy of the
knowing faculty above whatever else constitutes
the sum of existence in the universe. Knowledge,
of course, does not directly produce irreligion, or
extinguish piety; on the contrary, the more a
wise man knows of the universe, the more is he
lost in admiration of its excellence, and in wonder
at its mystery ; for, as Plato said, wonder is truly
a philosophical feeling; and to be full of a living
knowledge of things as they are, in their proper
relations and proportions, is simply to wonder and
to worship. But the knowing faculty is not the
whole of a living man, and to bring forth its
healthy fruits it must go hand-in-hand with a rich
moral nature; divorced from this, that will cer-
tainly show itself which St. Paul enunciates :
“ Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth."
In the exercise of the mind's cognitive faculty, iso-
lated from a complete and well-balanced humanity,
there is certainly no direct nourishment to the feel-
56 The Natural History of Atheism.
ing of reverence. Who is more sharp than a law-
yer ? Who is more clever than a weekly reviewer ?
Mere knowledge is only one element in the build-
ing up of a sound mind. It is not merely that you
know, but what you know, and how you know,
and how you use your knowledge, that makes
your knowledge a power—a legitimate power, let
us rather say—otherwise it is a usurpation, and,
like all illegitimate powers, smothers that which it
ought to protect. Everybody has read Goethe's
« Faust."
What does that self-vendition of a
German soul to the Powers of evil mean? Faust,
the speculative sinner, does not go to ruin, like
Don Juan, in the Spanish opera, because he flings
himself without limitation into the ocean of mere
sensual indulgence, putting his private pleasure in
the place of God's public order, and thus becom-
ing practically an atheist and a servant of the
devil ; but he goes to ruin, because he will not
accept the bounds of thinking by which all finite
being is necessarily confined. He must know
everything ; all the secret machinery of the uni-
verse must lie open to his gaze; the quick light-
ning of the blood's shooting through the mysteri-
ous alleys of vitality, must be measured by his
mortal optics; all which simply means, he scorns
Its Varieties and their Root.
57
to be a man with men; he will be a god with
gods; he will be his own god. He sets himself
above the legitimate authority of that alone self-
existent power which creates by limitation; and
in doing so, he hands himself over to the destruc-
tive Power which, by denying limitation, produces
what such denial alone can produce, dissolution
and chaos. Thus, in all intellectual, as in all
other pride, the root of atheism lies.
But there are various kinds of knowledge; and
of all kinds, that which has long had the most
evil reputation of begetting atheism is Physical
Science. · Tres medici duo athei. Is this a mere
vulgar calumny, or is there any noticeable truth at
the bottom of it? Very few such current prov-
erbs are churned out of nothing; and that there is
a certain connection between physical science and
atheism, the history of philosophy abundantly
declares. Democritus of Abdera, the reputed
father of the atomistic philosophy, afterwards
taught in the Attic gardens of Gargettus with such
applause by Epicurus, was the greatest naturalist
of his age ; and whatever may have been the per-
sonal opinions of the laughing sage with regard to
the gods, there can be no doubt that the philoso-
phical system expounded by his Attic disciple was
3*
58 The Natural History of Atheism.
utterly godless-worse than godless, indeed; for
it is better to deny the gods altogether, than to
shunt them off into a cloudy corner of the uni-
verse, and give them nothing to do but drink
nectar and laugh at limping Vulcan. The expla-
nation of the phenomena of the cosmos, by the
various action and interaction of mere force and
form which is the sum of the Epicurean doctrine,
is pure atheism, and indeed seems to have been
meant to put religion out of the world altogether ;
as we see plainly enough from the tone of the
opening verses of Lucretius, in his celebrated
Epicurean poem :
- Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum ! !"
"Such cruel woes on mortals came from grim religion's power."
And a century before the time of Epicurus we
find Aristophanes, in that most intellectual of farces
already named, giving the most emphatic promi-
nence to the fact that it was the physical philoso-
phers who, with their talk about atoms and vortices,
and collisions and entanglements, and general tur-
moil in the battle of blind forces, were doing away
with the notion of Jove altogether, and substituting
happy accident for wise Providence.' How far there
Its Varieties and their Root.
59
was a fair apology, or at least a plausible palliative,
for the physicists who made broad the phylacteries
of this sort of talk long ago, we shall afterwards
inquire. For those who revive the doctrine of the
construction of a beautifully ordered world by the
fortuitous concourse of atoms without mind, now-
adays, there is certainly no excuse; but what con-
cerns us specially to state here is, that there is
something in the researches of physical science, at
least in certain conditions of the intellectual atmo-
sphere, not apparently favourable to the growth of
piety and the cultivation of religious reverence.
In reading certain of the psalms of David, which
must be quite familiar to every English church-
goer, one feels as if walking through a splendid
picture-gallery, where not only the pictures are
beautiful and grand beyond the power of human
description, but, to compensate as it were for the
feebleness of the attempt to describe them, the face
of the divine artist is made to shine forth constant-
ly behind the frame, and give a living inspiration
and an intelligent presence to the scene. But in
not a few of our modern physical science books,
how different is the feeling! if, indeed, there is any
feeling in the matter at all-anything beyond a
curious fingering of wretched dumb details utterly
60
The Natural History of Atheism.
destitute of soul. Whatever is in the book, de-
pend upon it God is not there. You will hear no
end of talk about laws and forces, developments
and evolutions, metamorphic forms, transmuted
energies, and what not; but it is all dead-at least
all blind. For seeing intellect and shaping reason
there is no place in such systems. It is a mere
shallow superstition, according to these gentlemen,
to imagine any grand design in the system of the
Cosmos. There is no construction ; there is only
a conglomeration, or at best a concatenation,
That such Epicurean views are sported nowadays
on public platforms admits of no question ; that,
when philosophically tested, and not allowed to
veil their absurdity in a blue mist of fine phrases,
they yield nothing but a physical-science variety
of atheism, is equally certain ; and they naturally
provoke us to the inquiry how such unreasoned
drivel, after having been exploded for two thousand
years, should be revived, and planted on the
platform of boastful science as a new revelation
which poor benighted humanity should now at
length receive with most grateful bewonderment.
Of this lamentable upshot of so much high-sound-
ing talk, there are no doubt several causes ; but
under the present head of our discourse there fall
Its Varieties and their Root.
61
only two to be specially mentioned. First, as be-
fore said, because the highest cognitions are never
reached by the mere exercise of the knowing facul-
ty, on whatever subject exercised. Instincts and
aspirations are higher than knowledge; and the
pretensions of the merely scientific man to assume
the dictatorship of things that be are not founded
on nature. Many things can be known only by
being felt; all vital forces are fundamentally un-
knowable; but they exist not the less because
would-be philosopher B or would-be philosopher C
has no machinery with which to measure or to con-
trol them. Philosophy, itself the most abstract of
the sciences, must, as Goethe profoundly remarks,
be lived and loved, not merely tabulated and talked
about; and so those who parade mere knowledge as
the one thing needful are found at last, as the same
Goethe says, counting the parts with their fingers
when the spirit has fled. To the meagreness and
inadequacy of these knowledge-mongers Words-
worth finely alludes in his description of the various
classes of men who might be showing themselves
beside the green sod of a poet's grave :-
o A moralist perchance appears,
Led, heaven knows how, to this poor sod:
And he hath neither eyes nor ears,
Himself his world and his own god.
,
62
The Natural History of Atheism.
66 One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling
Nor form nor feeling, great or small;
A reasoning self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all in all."
Here the great philosophic poet clearly indicates
that without reverence and love, the mere man of
science remains incapable of comprehending either
humanity or divinity, becomes practically his own
god; and is in tone and temper, if not in abstract
speculation, an atheist. But it is of the physical
science men that we are talking at present; and
these also the thoughtful bard of the Lakes shows
out from the sacred presence of a true poet of
nature, with a sharp tone of quiet contempt, as
follows:
- Physician art thou? one all eyes ?
Philosopher ? a fingering slave,
One that could peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave !"
Of course general charges against whole classes
of men are not for a moment to be understood
here; but the writer takes a strongly-marked man
of the type, and this, like "the girl of the period,”
serves the purpose, though a man may live largely
in the period without perhaps meeting him or her
Its Varieties and their Root.
63
more than once. But the physicist, by the very
nature of his occupations, is unfavourably situated
in regard to the knowledge of spiritual things. He
is all eyes and all fingers; and confessedly neither
with the fleshly eye can one see God, nor with the
fleshly finger can one handle Him. And so it
comes about that a physicist, when left to the
meagre resources of his own science of externali-
ties, may come not to believe in mind at all, and
of course to deny God. Let him torture nature as
he will, strike out all sorts of flashing electricities,
pry curiously into the secret spring-work of vital
machinery by monstrous vivisections, yet he can-
not lay his finger on God. There is therefore no
God-nothing that he can lay his finger on; there-
fore nothing at all; only talk about laws and
forces, and an eternal blind struggle of the stronger
to kick the weaker out of the room. Such is the
sad fashion by which the study of mere physical
science, unelevated by a high religious philosophy,
runs into the blank vacuities and blind fortuities
of atheism. It must always be so. No pyramid
ever stood upon its apex, and no reasonable ex-
planation of a reasonable world can be evolved
from a tabulation of mere externalities. The king-
dom of true knowledge, like the kingdom of
64 The Natural History of Atheism.
heaven, is within. No philosophy worth the
name was ever arrived at by external induction.
By induction dead shells may be gathered, but the
life of the soft-bodied creature which inhabits the
shell is produced by the living power of Divine
Reason, the soul of this mysteriously-ordered
world, which eludes all microscopes to behold, and
defies all pincers to grasp.
I have spoken hitherto mainly about the men of
physical science, because since Bacon, they have
been making large their phylacteries in this coun-
try, and stirring the minds of men wonderfully.
There are reasons for this ; and for the brilliant
antediluvian, pre-Adamitic and other discoveries
which they have made, we may feel disposed
kindly to forgive them a little nonsense. A wise
man on a hobby-horse is never an edifying specta-
cle; but the creature delights himself for a lifetime
perhaps, and we are amused for an hour.
now look in another direction. There is no non-
sense like learned nonsense; and of all learned
nonsense, metaphysical nonsense is the most
extravagant. Of course among other forms of
insane abstract speculation, we have metaphysical
atheism; and the father of this sort of nonsense,
in modern times, was a Scotsinan, David Hume.
Let us
Its Varieties and their Root.
65
No man, I presume, who has read his works will
deny that Hume was a very clever fellow, a very
agreeable, gentlemanly fellow too, and a man who
combined a knowledge of books with a knowledge
of men to an extent very rarely exhibited in the
country which produced him; still he talked non-
sense about causation, and about the ultimate
cause; and this nonsense is to be traced in the
case of the metaphysician, as in that of the physi-
cist, ultimately to a want of reverence in his char-
acter, aided by a certain flatness, and shallowness,
and want of earnestness in the age to which he
belonged. With regard to metaphysical nonsense
generally, and the atheism which it will occasion-
ally produce, we must bear in mind what Professor
Ferrier says, in the first chapters of his profound
work on Consciousness. Of all men, says that
subtle and substantial thinker, the metaphysician
is most apt to run himself into the blind alley of
some inextricable absurdity; for he aims at ex-
plaining the very complex machinery of the vasty
universe by some one favourite principle, or
method ; and, if this principle be either wrong in
itself, or wrongly applied, or if it contains only
one half the truth, or only a certain attitude and
aspect of the truth, the whole of the ingeniously
66
The Natural History of Atheism.
spun system becomes a gossamer web, not strong
enough to hold a fly. What Hume said, for in-
stance, about the comparison of a piece of human
architecture, with the architecture of the universe,
that we know everything about the one, and can
know nothing about the other, is true only in so
far as organized growth is a much more excellent
and a much more divine thing than the best com-
pacted masonry; manufactures of all kinds we can
produce ; growth of any kind, from the branching
foliage of tropical vegetation to the tiniest spot of
grey lichen on a bare rock, defies the most cun-
ning of our scientific appliances. Here no doubt
is a gap; but on the other hand, the grand con-
gruities of eternal Reason shine out as plainly in
the divine architecture as in the human ; and the
intellectual process of the universe, which we call
growth, is not the less intelligible because it is not
merely mechanical, but only the more wonderful.
Another of the pretty sophisms, with which the
Scottish sceptic, as we remarked in the last chap-
ter, strangled his healthy human instinct, was that
about causation. Of course what many superficial
observers call a cause, is only a point in an invari-
able sequence; it needed no philosopher to tell us
this, but when he, and a whole school of meagre
Its Varieties and their Root.
67
puzzlers after him, told us seriously that causation
means only invariable sequence, we are inclined
to subscribe to any nonsense in the Council of
Trent, and to any horrors in the most damnatory
creed, rather than fill our bellies with such East
wind, and believe it to contain any virtue that
makes warm blood. There is not a sane man out
of Bedlam who will not confess, when the thing is
properly put before him, that the invariability of
any sequence is just the very thing that renders
the idea of a cause necessary : as necessary in fact
to the constitution of a reasoned universe, as some
fundamental axiom is to the proof of a mathemati-
cal theorem. But your metaphysician will not see
this ; he must have a special transcendental region
for himself, where he may make unhindered all
sorts of abstract postures and somersets and curious
antic wriggling, at which He who sitteth in heaven
shall laugh; and so rather than believe a creative
mind with Moses, or a plastic reason with Plato,
he sets himself in a pretentious wordy way to
evolve all things out of a dark hollow centre of
nothingness, and bind them together with a girdle
of black impenetrable necessity. Surely wise
men, who talk such things, have been taken in the
net of their own subtleties, while out of the mouths
68
The Natural History of Atheisin.
of babes and sucklings, in modern as in ancient
times, God hath perfected praise.
It is always more safe, in matters of healthy
human sentiment, to trust to poets than to philo-
sophers. A living sympathy with nature never
can lead you far wrong. Men of the calibre of
Homer, Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Walter
Scott, never strangle the broad realities of nature
with ingenious and unsubstantial subtleties. A
poet is naturally a religious animal; we shall not,
therefore, presumably expect atheism from him ;
nevertheless, we had Lucretius; and some of our
most brilliant notorieties in the modern world of
song, are not the most notable for piety. Let us
inquire, therefore, lastly, by what extravagant and
erring fight the bright-winged creature called a
poet may sometimes be charmed away into the
dim limbos and dark vortices of a godless cosmos.
Other causes of such blind plunges will be noticed
afterwards; the present order of our discourse
only calls on us to remark, that there may be an
idolatry of the imaginative, as well as of the know-
ing faculty. Reverence no doubt is as necessary
to the complete poet as love; but just as a man
may have a grand swing of the imaginative facul-
ty, and yet be wayward, wilful, and extremely
Its Varieties and their Root.
69
selfish-like. Lord Byron--so it is possible for a
rhymer to have in his brain-chamber a perfect
kaleidoscope of shifting beauties, and yet lack that
veneration for the grand central truth of the uni-
verse which gives elevation to all beauty, and
significance to all variety. The Greeks had one
very valuable idea, that a poet was always a gogós,
a wise man, and the best definition of poetry, to
suit their practice, would be harmonious wisdom.
But in our age of multiplied specialties, we are
too apt to run after dexterity in artistical exhibi-
tion, without regard to health of tone, sanity of
meaning, or naturalness of expression. Poetry, of
course, as well as music and dancing, may luxuri-
ate amply in this direction; and the sacred art of
the poet, of which the virtue is by truthful and
vivid pictures to teach the wisdom of life, and
justify the ways of God to man, may degenerate
into a succession of dexterous pyrotechnic dis-
plays, and startling explosions of brilliant egotism,
in which no worship dwells. Thus a practical di-
vorce between poetry and piety may take place ;
and though no direct war be proclaimed against
religion-as in Lucretius—a pious man feels a sort
of want in the effusions of poets of this defective
type, somewhat as if one were to walk through
70 The Natural History of Atheism.
Windsor Palace, and see splendid traces of every-
thing but the Queen. Let the young poet, there-
fore, beware of glorying too much in his strength.
A man may do anything, said the wise old octo-
genarian of Weimar, except live at random, sich
gehen lassen. Floating about on rosy clouds for
mere self-delectation, or flashing forth a series of
iridescent coruscations for the amusement of those
who seek for excitement, rather than improve-
ment, will never exhaust the function of "the
pious bards who speak things worthy of Phoebus."
To attain this dignity there must be a consecration
of the whole man, his natural genius, and his
acquired dexterities, to the service of the great
Architect, in whose living temple the highest
honour the best of us can achieve is to be service-
able stones.
Thus much for atheism, speculative or practical,
declared and marked, or only insinuated and indi-
cated, when viewed as proceeding from the want
of a root of reverence in the soul. In the next
two chapters I shall consider the phenomena of
this abnormal state of mind, where it seems to
spring rather from an exaggeration, or misdirec-
tion, than from a deficiency of the noble emotion
of wonder ; and I shall then conclude with con-
Its Varieties and their Root.
71
sidering how far atheism, or at least an absence of
natural piety, may in many cases be only the
rebound of an ill-balanced mind from the asperi-
ties and the rigidities of some local orthodoxy.
If there is rebellion anywhere in a State, the Gov-
ernment is seldom altogether free from blame.
CHAPTER IV.
POLYTHEISM.
Fragilis et laboriosa mortalitas in partes ista digessit, infirmi-
tatis suæ memor, ut portionibus coleret quisque quo maxime indi-
geret.'
"PLINY.
POLEN
OLYTHEISM is not atheism certainly on the
very face of the word; many gods can never
mean no god; and therefore the intelligent reader
may justly ask what is it doing here? The answer
is simply this, that we have to do in this discourse
not merely with abstract beliefs, but with practical
consequences which flow from them; not with the
abstract denial of a God, but with the concrete
existence of such fancies, notions, or dogmas about
God, as practically result in a denial of a divine
order and beauty and harmony in that reasoned
unity of things which we call the world. When in
a well-known passage of his epistle to the Ephe-
sians (ii. 12) St. Paul talks of the members of the
Polytheism.
73
Christian Church in that part of the East as having
lived formerly the slaves of all sorts of base lusts
and passions without God-a0con—and without
hope in the world—though the word adeos is no
doubt frequently used by classical writers to signify
a man holding dogmatically what we call atheistical
opinions—there is no reason to suppose that he
had any such shallow dogmatists specially in view;
but a man with him is an atheist, even though per-
haps paying worship to some gods, or demons-
like the Ceylonese—who as a matter of moral fact
shows by all his conduct that he believes in no
established order of a great social brotherhood of
men born of a common father, but recognises only
his personal will, and special passion as the legiti-
mate motive power of human conduct. Or, to
take a simile from political life, that man is a traitor
and a rebel not only who pastes a public proclama-
tion up in the market-place that the king has no
right to reign, but much more rather the man who
refuses to pay the taxes, disdains the accepted
tokens of homage, and draws his sword for the
head of his own clan, and in the cause of his own
kinship only, not for the head of the State. So,
if the celebrated Macdonald of the Isles lost his
haughty position in the Hebridean seas, was fined
4
74
The Natural History of Atheism.
of his lordship, and swept all his clan with himself
into ruin as the natural issue of his reiterated
attempts to shake off the legitimate authority of
the monarch to whom he had sworn fealty, in the
same way it may be in the religious world, that
if any people prostrate themselves before gods
which are no gods, and whose intervention hinders
the true God from being seen and recognised, they
may be guilty of a conduct which is practically as
bad, or even worse, than absolute atheism. For
religious atheism—that is, atheistical doctrine-
means only an absence of all positive theological
contents, and may be quite consistent, as in the
case of Buddha to be presently considered, with a
strict observance of the great moral laws that bind
society together, and even with a belief in the
necessary moral consequences of actions, entailed
from generation to generation-as, indeed, the
Buddhists believe of all men most firmly ; but the
misdirected reverence and utterly unreasonable
religiosity of some forms of superstition, may in
its effect on social life amount to what the mathe-
maticians call a minus quantity, that is, something
worse than nothing; as certain kinds of food,
though not immediately poisonous, may by the
presence of some element unfavourable to a healthy
Polytheism.
75
vitality, lead by sure degrees to the disruption of
the system. This consideration it was which led
Plutarch and other wise ancients to discuss the
question whether atheism or superstition is the
more pernicious ?-a question which manifestly
admits of no clear answer; for, while on the one
hand there may be an intellectual atheism associ-
ated with so much practical goodness as to make
it socially innocuous, there may, on the other
hand, be a inoral atheism ramping so wildly
through all the organism of society, and disturbing
the machinery of human life to such a degree as
to render many kinds of degrading superstition less
dangerous. Our inquiry, therefore, into the origin
and character of polytheism, as connected with
atheism, will tend to bring into view two important
aspects of that misdirected reverence, too often
confounded; first, that aspect of polytheism in
which the good so predominates as to make it in
a social point of view emphatically preferable to all
forms of atheism ; and secondly, that more de-
graded aspect which presents itself when neither
poetical grace, nor gracious moral influences, nor
an underlying consciousness of dimly-shadowed
monotheism, contributes anything to redeem the.
absurdity, or mitigate the baseness of a reverence
76
The Natural History of Atheism.
fathered by fear, and a worship inspired by selfish-
ness. And in setting forth the most obvious prop-
ositions belonging to this interesting theme, if we
confine ourselves mainly to illustrations from the
Greek religion, it will be because we shall thus be
using materials with which all educated persons in
this country are to a certain extent familiar, and
in the right theological use of which they will natu-
rally feel an interest.
On the origin and significance of the mythologi-
cal theology of the Greeks and other polytheistic
races, no small amount of nonsense, both learned
and unlearned, will be found loading the library-
shelves; and this is not at all to be wondered at,
considering that the most original and imaginative
thinkers on the subject often want the requisite
learning; while men of learning too frequently
are destitute not only of that fine feeling for the
poetry and piety of nature which belongs specially
to all mythological interpretation, but of the
sound common sense and freedom from favourite
fancies which is necessary to the recognition of
truth in any quarter. But after the full and thor-
ough discussion which Greek mythology has re-
ceived during the present century, specially from
the Germans, and the wider range of induction
Polytheism.
77
opened up to scholars by the Oriental excursions
of the Sanscritists and other comparative philolo-
gers, we have no difficulty now in planting our
foot on at least one broad basis of scientific cer-
tainty in this field. Favourite theories and darling
speculations of various kinds being blown away,
a sound eye can discern clearly the great physical
forces of nature as lying at the root of the luxu-
riant growth of motley and grotesque, or graceful,
beautiful, and sublime figures which composed
the popular Pantheons of India and Greece. Not
that 'other elements sometimes did not enter into
the composition of this popular theology; but in
the main the forces of external nature, figured
by imagination and fired by passion, formed a
groundwork of all polytheistic idolatry, at once
the most natural and the most extensive. Let us
endeavour to realise to ourselves how this took
place. Let us drop out in imagination the knowl-
edge of the one true God from the centre of our
fundamental ideas with regard to the Universe
of which ideas the unity of the Divine nature in all
Christian countries forms now the keystone-and
see what remains. Imagine a creature such as
man in the first stages of society historically was-
of quick sensibility, vivid imagination, hasty pas-
78
The Natural History of Atheism.
sion, overpowering emotion, limited knowledge,
and small speculation - sometimes, no doubt,
grandly conscious of his own power as a living
being of great energy and scope, but not rarely
possessed, or it may be oppressed, by the feeling
of his own feebleness, helplessness, and depend-
ence. Dependence on what? Place yourself in
thought in the middle of a broad dreary moor
during a thunderstorm, or on the surge of a foam-
ing sea fretted with reefs, in a ship without a
pilot, or at the bottom of a smoking mountain,
spouting sulphurous clouds, and pouring forth
rivers of red molten rock over the works and
ways of mortal men, and you will feel in a moment
that your life is continually at the mercy of three
elements--AIR, WATER, and FIRE, before whose
manifestations of might and violence, the strongest
mortal is as weak as a straw in the whirlwind, or a
worm beneath the tramp of a rhinoceros. What
then will a poor, ignorant, helpless creature, with-
out special light, in these circumstances natur-
ally do? He will cry out and appeal to the ele-
ment, or the force behind the elemenť--let it be
AIR, WATER, or FIRE—with which he has for the
moment to do; and this element, in defect of
further generalisation, will become a god; not
Polytheism.
79
the material element, however, simply as we are
apt to conceive it in modern language, or a form
of what we call matter, but the energetic totality
of the thing exercising a power, apparently of a
similar nature to that which we exercise when we
put forth our arm, and produce similar effects.
The Air, therefore, or the Fire, or the Water, is
conceived dimly as a person, at least as exercising
the functions of a person; it is a superhuman,
incalculable, transcendental force—that is, com-
paratively a divine power, and therefore will natur-
ally, if curious reason does not interfere, be recog-
nised and, by some sort of homage or worship,
acknowledged as a god. And this hasty gener-
alisation, as the logicians would say, will have at
least one striking fact in its favour, of which it will
require some considerable advance in science,
some ripeness in speculation, or some special
revelation to rebut the force. These potent ele-
ments, of which feeble man seems as it were the
sport, do not by any means to the vulgar eye
present the aspect of harmonious and concentuous
powers ; they rather stand forward in the attitude
of antagonists, to struggle and to battle together,
to overwhelm, overmaster, neutralise and annihi-
late one another in a most unfriendly way. We
80
The Natural History of Atheism.
are therefore, at our first encounter with one of
these outbursts of apparently unreined and unruly
power, at a very far remove from the idea of the
Divine UNITY. Thus we have got, by a single
step, at the constitution of a separate divine force
for Air, Water, and Fire, which, by-and-by, the
natural action of a vivid imagination will shape
into the complete figure of a thundering Jupiter,
an earth-shaking Neptune, and a metal-melting
Vulcan, with all the appropriate badges, weapons,
and appurtenances, that with chastened taste in
the West and grotesque symbolism in the East
would naturally attach themselves to such person-
ages.
Let us now look to the evidence from historical
and literary fact, We had occasion to mention
already, in our first paper, that Homer distinctly
mentions OCEAN as the great progenitor of the
Hellenic gods; and, though this god was rather an
antiquated personage in the days of the poet, and
comes up more as a sort of fossil witness or an
underlying stratum of old popular tradition, the
famous verse (Il. xii. v. 245) in which his name
occurs is only the more significant as a stereotyped
proof of the original element out of which the fully
equipped equestrian Poseidon afterwards started
Polytheism.
81
into being. But even in later days the same undis-
guised element plays its part with the other most
ancient gods in the well-known tragedy of Æschy-
lus, from which Shelley, Byron, Goethe and others
have drawn such favourite inspiration.* In the
same way, we find that, though the golden-locked
Apollo, the celestial archer, has in familiar Greek
theology completely displaced the original sun out
of which he grew, nevertheless, this undisguised
elemental sun, this bright, all-seeing, all-command-
ing Helios -- Acos - keeps his ground, distinctly
acknowledged in the most solemn form of oath
which a pious Greek could take into his mouth.
Father Jove, from Ida swaying God most glorious and great,
And thou, Sun, the all-pervading and all-hearing power, and ye
Rivers and Earth. +
And so with the rest. To an eye once open to
the fact that the great embodied celestial and terres-
trial forces, which form partly the stage and partly
the atmosphere of our human life, were the original
gods of Greece, it requires no accidental or extend-
ed recognition by the Greek poets to enable it to see
through the thin veil of human personality under
* The “ Prometheus Bound,” in the introductory scenes,
+ Iliad, iii. 277.
$*
82
The Natural History of Atheism.
which their elemental significance lay concealed.
Plato, and thinkers much below his range, saw the
truth and spoke it out plainly ; * and, in fact, a mere
modern poet, from the reverential contemplation of
the varying forms and forces of Nature, will often
reconstitute the persons of the Greek Pantheon with-
out any formal historical tradition, and a man must
be dull indeed who does not see in all the epithets
of Jupiter and Neptune, the most obvious imperso-
nations of the thunderous atmosphere and the bil-
lowy main. A dark-browed king, girdled with
dark-blue clouds, driving across the copper-floor of
the firmament, in a chariot of thundering steeds,
with a flashing bolt in his hand, and an eagle in
ministering attendance, this is exactly the figure
that a poetical imagination would body forth, when
wishing to give a human shape to the awful Divine
Force which lies in that perturbation of the aerial
elements which we call thunder. And, if ships
are called in poetical language“ the white-winged
coursers of the deep,” how is it possible for a poeti-
cal mind, embodying in human form the divine
*“ It seems plain that the original inhabitants of Greece wor-
shipped the same gods as are now acknowledged by the majority of
the Barbarians, as the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, the Stars and the
Sky.”—Cratylus, p. 397. D.
Polytheism.
83
form of the foaming billows, to avoid the image of
a long-bearded charioteer, crowned with chaplets
of seaweed, and bounding from wave to wave in a
chariot drawn by cerulean steeds, with troops of
gods, half-man, half-fish, blowing shells behind ?
All this lies upon the surface, and calls for no
erudite research or curious commentary. But let
us take a familiar instance a little less obvious to
the unprofessional eye, but not less certain to a
well-schooled mythologer. What were the HAR-
PIES? Not a few of our readers will remember,
from their school-days, how the “ pious Æneas,"
in the course of his long sea-wanderings and stormy
toils to found the mighty Rome, after leaving Crete
and rounding Cape Matapan, landed upon certain
rocky islands to the west of Greece in the Archi-
pelago called the Strophades, and there, with his
wearied crew, sat down on the beach to take some
needful refreshment; but scarcely had they sat
down-
When lo ! the Harpies with horrific swoop
Leap from the hills, and fearful-clanging wings
And with their obscene claws invade the feast
And spread pollution o'er the board, with blasts
Pestiferous, and screams, that rend the ear.*
* Æneid iii. 225.
84 The Natural History of Atheism.
At this unseemly interruption from their prepared
meal, the voyagers rise in wrath, seize their swords,
and commence a vigorous offensive war against
their rude assaulters. But in vain. Like Macbeth's
witches, they fly off, receiving no scaith from touch
of mortal blade ; and, perched on the top of an ad-
jacent cliff, the leader of the filthy chorus, called
Celæno, screeches forth a hideous prophecy against
the much-enduring founders of imperial Rome.
In
mythology, as indeed in the early history of all
original races, names are always significant; but
the name of this personage, Celano, meaning in
Greek BLACK, will not help us far in the interpre-
tation of the myth. When we turn to Homer and
Hesiod, however, the names of these vaporous
Seizers (so Harpies means, from áprácw) publish
their elemental significance in terms too plain for
commentary. Hesiod, the earliest doctor of theolo-
gy, and acknowledged theologer of the Greeks, in
his genealogy of the gods gives the following ac-
count of the pedigree of the Harpies :-
Thaumas married Electra, the daughter of deep-flowing Ocean :
She to Iris gave birth, the swift, and she to the Harpies,
Beautiful haired, AELLO yclept, and OCYPETE, maidens
Swiftly-winged to follow the path of the bird, or the vagrant
Breeze on the brae.
Polytheism.
85
Now these two names signify, the one whirl-
wind, and the other swift-swooping; so that their
names alone declare their nature, as plainly as the
moral characters of the various pilgrims are ex-
pressed by their names in Bunyan's popular alle-
gory; and though it rather appears that in the
case of Apollo Homer and his brother-minstrels
had no notion of his original identity with the ele-
mental Helios or the Sun, yet in the case of the
Harpies the poet plainly indicates his conscious-
ness of their original character, when he says of the
daughters of Pandarus in one line that they were
snatched away by the Harpies, and in another line
that they were snatched away by the whirlwinds. *
We have here, therefore, a plain case of mytholo-
gical personages, playing a sort of equivocal part
between the element of which they were the im-
personation, and the anthropomorphic impersona-
tion itself. In the hymns of the Rig Veda—thanks
to the labours of Max Müller, and other learned
Sanscritists—this sort of equivocal, half elemental,
half anthropomorphic divine powers may be seen
in great numbers, and studied to great advantage.
We have placed this case of the Harpies in some
detail before the reader till he may be able to judge
Odyssey, xx. 66 and 77.
86
The Natural History of Atheism.
for himself, from what root of scholarly induction
the true meaning of mythological personage may
be evolved. How the direct intuition of a poetic
mind familiar with the striking aspects and the
vital significance of natural scenery, may, without
learned research, flash forth the deepest signifi-
cance of these matters in the most graceful way,
the following passage from Wordsworth will most
effectively declare-
“Once more to distant ages of the world
Let us revert, and place before our thoughts
The face which rural solitude might wear
To the unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece.
In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretch'd
On the soft grass, through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose ;
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sound
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun,
A beardless youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, liſting a bright eye
Up towards the crescent-moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence, a beaming goddess with her nymphs,
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave,
Swept in the storm of chase: as moon and stars
Polytheism.
87
Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,
When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked
His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked
The Naiad. Sunbeams upon distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly.
The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings,
Lacked not, for love, fair objects whom they wooed,
With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,
Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,
From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth
In the low vale, or on steep mountain side ;
And, sometimes, intermixed with stirring horns
Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard,
These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood
Of gamesome Deities : or Pan himself,
The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God."
The genesis of mythological theology from the
action of a reverential imagination on the forms
and forces of external nature, being thus explained
in a few prominent instances, we have next to
bear in mind that the tendency to elevate such
imaginative pictures into personal gods, and
clothe them with human attributes, having once
set in, could not be expected in the general case
to confine itself to the few striking instances from
which it started. It was possible, indeed, to have
made the start from the moral physical dualism of
HEAVEN and EARTH, as in Hesiod; or from the
moral dualism of the Good and Evil principle, as
88
The Natural History of Atheism.
in the theology of the ancient Persians, and to
stop there; but the moment that a separate God
has been assigned to the thunder, and another to
the Sun, the creation of an uncounted multitude
of separate divine personalities was as natural and
necessary as the growth of a broad-branching tree
from a small seed. Division and subdivision, as
so beautifully described in Goethe's poem of the
Metamorphosis of Plants, is the law of growth in
Nature, and the law of development in imaginative
theology. Now observe what follows. Not only
the grand and overwhelming, but at the same
time comparatively definite and well- marked
forces of external nature, but the more mysterious
and incalculable, and often strongly unmanageable
emotions and passions of the inward man, come in
for their full share of individualized deification;
and these passions and emotions, being recognised
only as divine Forces, will naturally receive their
allotment of worship without any attempted dis-
tinction between the moral good and evil from
which they spring, or the good and evil conse-
quences to which they tend. Altars will be
erected to FEAR* and to FEVER, as well as to
* “ Tullus in re trepida aras PALLORI et FAVORI vovit.'
Livy i. 27.
Polytheism.
89
JUSTICE and to MERCY. And not only so, but if
we take, for instance, the worship of impersonated
passions, in themselves natural, healthy, and
good, such as the worship of vital enjoyment,
under the form of DIONYSUS, the planter of the
vine, and of sexual sympathy, under the form of
Aphrodite, it is easy to see that fervent devotion
to such divine forces might easily degenerate into
hot-beds of the most vulgar sensualism. Gener-
ally, indeed, we may see in Polytheism, as we
have sketched its origin, a radical vice in the want
of a definite and well-marked line between moral
right and wrong in the objects of popular worship,
so that even at its best, that is when, as in Greece,
it was inspired and moulded by a pervading spirit
of beauty, it makes its appeal to the ästhetical
rather than to the moral faculties of our compound
nature : being, also, as we have seen in its origin,
without any regulating power, it is free on all
sides to run into rampant excess; in which case
the application of the proverb will not be far to
seek, corruptio optimi pessima--the corruption of
the best is the worst. When good things are
bad, they are very bad. Let us see, then, by an
example, how these things acted in practice
among our model-polytheists, the ancient Greeks.
90
The Natural History of Atheism.
In the minute topographical description of Athens
given by the antiquarian traveller of the second
century-Pausanias, the Grose of Greece--we find
the following passage :-"In the market-place
(ayopá) of Athens, among other remarkable things
not generally noticed, is an altar of MERCY, a
goddess, to whom, on account of her manifest
utility in all the changes of human life, the
Athenians, but the Athenians alone, pay reasona-
ble worship. For this people, of all the Greeks,
are not only the most humane and civilized in all
social matters, but they are specially notable for
their piety ; * and besides this to MERCY, they
have erected altars to REVERENCE, and to
RUMOUR, and to IMPULSE. And we see from
this plainly how those states which are most dis-
tinguished for piety, are at the same time most
favoured by the gods in the matter of prosperity
and good fortune.” And to show how this wor-
ship of MERCY and REVERENCE acted in practice
we have only to appeal to a well-known passage in
the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles, in which the
* The Bible reader will recall the introductory words of St.
Paul's famous Address (Acts xvii.), though these commentators are
certainly wrong who suppose that the word deloldaluovégtepos in this
passage is used in a complimentary sense by the apostolic writer.
Polytheism.
91
penitent son of the injured old monarch, using the
strongest appeal to move the heart of his wrathful
parent, says:
“For MERCY sits with Jove upon the throne
In every doom : so may she not from thee
Sit far, my father ! ”
But an example from historical fact will perhaps
be better. The elegant Greek humourist, Lucian,
in that charming morsel of biography entitled
“Demonax," relates that this philosopher, who
had a remarkable power over the Athenians, on
one occasion, when the citizens, from a rivalry
with the Corinthians, were proposing to get up an
exhibition of gladiators after the manner of their
then masters, the Romans, stood up publicly and
said—“Do not, men of Athens, bring forward a
bill for any such purpose, till you have rooted
away the altar of Mercy so prominent in your
market-place." In such cases it is plain that,
however founded in an intellectual error and in
one sense atheistical, as worshipping the creature
rather than the Creator, Polytheism was calculated
to exercise, and actually did exercise, a moral
power of singular effectiveness. In fact, as we see
every day, a mere orthodoxy of the head in the
92
The Natural History of Atheism.
Christian world, without any such practical issues
as this intellectual rightness is calculated to pro-
duce, so, on the other hand, gross intellectual error
may exist along with remarkable moral rightness.
The question, therefore, whether in any particular
religion Polytheism may not be more dishonouring
to God than Atheism, depends partly on the na-
ture of the deities worshipped, partly on the ca-
pacity of the people worshipping for making the
best use of slippery and equivocal materials ;
partly, also, on the counterbalancing forces which
any Polytheistic form may contain within itself,
neutralising the consistent action of its own worst
elements. With these tests in our hand, we can
have little difficulty in perceiving that, though
Greek popular theology contained certain ele-
ments whose ignoble issues completely justified the
condemnation passed upon it by St. Paul in the
first chapter of the Romans, it was in the main, at
least in its palmy days, morally beneficent in its
tendency, and as such, we may say less dishonour-
ing to God, and less monstrous in man, than even
the most moral forms of cold, self-contained, un-
ympathetic, and essentially unhuman Atheism.
It was impossible, indeed, that a people so nobly
endowed as the Greeks, and whose genius had
Polytheism.
93
elevated the rude songs of an annual harvest-home
into such a lofty platform of moral teaching as we
find in the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides,* should have failed to let the grosser
elements of their physical theology drop, and to
bring into the foreground what higher elements in
that group of motley forces were calculated to stir
the noblest chords in the human heart, and elevate
their worshippers to some likeness of the more
perfect beings whom they believed. And, accord-
ingly, we find that the favourite patron-goddess of
the Athenians, whose far-glittering spear the sea-
tossed sailor greeted as he rounded the Sunian
promontory, was in point of moral character as
elevating an object of worship as any purest saint
in the Christian calendar. No doubt, this same
Pallas, in the “Iliad," + teaches Pandarus to break
a truce sealed by the most solemn oaths. But
this glaring violation of one of the most weighty
points of the moral law, in the person of the flash-
ing-eyed daughter of the supreme ruler of Olym-
pus, is one of those inconsistencies which are
* “ The preaching power, as we may call it, of the Greek stage
as a pulpit, will be best realised by reading the Furies of Æschylus,
and the opening chorus of the Agamemnon by the same lofty
genius."
+ Book iv.
94
The Natural History of Atheism.
readily condoned to the patriotic partiality of the
poem, and the unsuspecting simplicity of the poet.
We must bear in mind, also, that no people,
though it carries along with it the forms of ex-
pression belonging to the crude theology of an
early age, is practically influenced, in its stages of
higher social growth, by all that such crude forms
of expression would consistently seem to imply.
On the contrary, a certain inconsistency is the sal-
vation of all popular creeds; and Plato must per-
haps be looked on as somewhat pedantic, or, at
least, as over-severe, when in the second book of
his ideal polity he inveighs' so seriously against the
theological teaching of the great national minstrel.
Homer, no doubt-the poet, as they called him--
had an immense moral influence over every Greek
mind; but his poems were secular, not sacred ;
and no person was obliged to make a formal sub-
scription to all his theological teachings, as if they
were divine oracles. On the contrary, the wise
Greeks reserved to themselves the complete right
of excluding from their articles of faith any fact or
fable asserted of the gods which they considered
as unworthy of the Divine Nature. In Aristo-
phanes it is quite true that a disobedient son is in-
troduced who justifies his insolence to his father
Polytheism.
95
by the treatment which Father Kronos receives
from young Jove, in the mythological allegories.
But the Greeks had sense enough to know that
things said or done about the gods in the comic
department of their religious exhibitions—for the
drama was part of the national religion—were said
or done only to excite a laugh, and could be said
and done, as they were said and done, only be-
cause everybody knew that no reasonable man
would think of transferring such jokes to the sober
guidance of life, when holiday fun was over. Had
such jokes been perpetrated on the serious stage
of tragedy, nay, had even any impropriety been
committed in the dignified dress and costume of
the gods, we have the best authority for saying
that the religious feelings of the public would have
been grossly outraged, and the author would have
been censured by the authorities. *
But the great
salt of the Greek mythology, and which kept it,
even in its worst days, from sinking into a state of
putridity and pollution more degrading than many
forms of atheism, which it was perfectly capable of
when this antidote ceased to act, was the central
truth of the supremacy of Jove as the moral ruler
of the universe—a supremacy, in fact, which con-
* See Lucian, Piscator, ch. 33.
96 The Natural History of Atheism.
stituted a sort of MONOTHEISM working powerfully
behind scenes, and saving Polytheism from that
sensualistic anarchy into which, without such steer-
age, it would inevitably have been plunged. On
this characteristic of Greek Polytheism, too often
lost sight of, or not fairly weighed, a word or
two will help us to that correct estimate of the
moral action of Polytheism, as contrasted with
Atheism, which it is our object in this place to
make.
Any person turning to the “Iliad” at that
culminating point of Achillean prowess called
“ The Battle of the Gods,” will find himself in the
middle of a scene of celestial antagonism and em-
broilment, such as seems to render the belief in
any consistent moral government from the throne
of the Hellenic Olympus impossible. Nothing in-
deed could appear more degrading to the Divine
· Nature, or further removed from the severe stabil-
ity of celestial rule as contrasted with the un-
certainty and mutability of earthly dynasties, than
such a struggle and collision, contrariety and con-
fusion of Heavenly potencies as this scene presents.
When the water-god rages against the fire-god,
and the brother and spouse of the Supreme Re-
gent enter the field openly to dispute the com-
Polytheism.
97
mands, and to brave the authority, by virtue of
which alone all order and subordination exist in
the universe—how is it possible that the faith of
any religiously-disposed person should find conso-
lation in the thought of such an anarchy ? And is
not the attitude of self-contained in difference to all
super-mundane powers which the Epicurean athe-
ist maintains, at once more reasonable and more
comfortable ? More reasonable, certainly, and
more comfortable, if that battle of the gods were
all of the Polytheistic Providence known to the
Greeks, or indeed anything but an incidental scene,
worked up into a somewhat melodramatic exag-
geration by the feverish fancy of the poet. But
behind all this apparent confusion the almighty
Jove sits as serene on his throne as the sun behind
the wild race of ragged clouds on a stormy day.
It is always a difficult matter for a Christian Mon-
otheist to sympathise with the religious attitude
of pious Polytheists. Homer knew perfectly well
that all this clatter and clash of irate celestial
Powers was as futile in the long run to disturb the
counsel of Jove, as the barking of an army of curs
to bring down the bright sister of Apollo from her
sphere. As the pilot that weathers the storms
rides gallantly on the rim of a roar of billows,
5
98 The Natural History of Atheism.
every one of which, to the timid cowering land-
lubber, seems destined to engulph the tiny craft
in its gorge, so the pious Greek Polytheist, of
whom Homer was the spokesman, cherishes an
unshaken faith amid all the turmoil of hostile
forces, whether terrestrial or celestial, that an
Almighty one sits above, whose throne may not
be shaken. Neptune may rage, and Juno pout;
even Minerva may condescend to an incidental
patronage of perjury; but Jove sits apart, on
“ the highest peak of the many-ridged Olympus;
and where he sits, Justice and Law and the Fates
sit with him, as firm as the brazen floor of the
firmament which they tread. Those critics who
doubt the unity of the “Iliad," and tear it in
pieces, as an ill-made Mosaic, will certainly not
doubt the unity of this idea, which controls and
moulds the whole process of the action.
Alòs ó êteheleto Bours, and the “ Counsel of Jove
was fulfilled." *
In order to understand the strong
back-bone of Monotheism which kept the hostile
elements of the Hellenic Polytheism from being
dissipated into smoke, we must bear in mind that
* In the invocation at the beginning of what, notwithstanding all
the micrologic analysis of the ultra-Wolfans, we shall still wisely
believe to be a great poem, the product of a great poetical genius.
UAB
Polytheism.
Liliarityar
92 HICHIGA
the original omnipotence of Jove, which belonged
to his character as the wielder of the thunderbolt,
was naturally transferred to him as the head of a
social order of gods and men ; and that in this
capacity not only was his authority, absolute-like
that of the patriarchal chief in early society-but
his wisdom as supreme ruler was undisputed, and
his kindly disposition as father of the divine and
human family as unquestioned as his justice. In
him, in fact, centre all those physical and moral
forces, which of right belong to the strong and
beneficent upholder of the physical and moral
order of things in the universe. And so endowed,
we rejoice to see him put prominently forward on
all occasions as the friend of the weak and op-
pressed, the protector of suppliants, the advocate
of strangers; and specially, as truth in all the rela-
tions of public and private life is the cement of
ociety, he launches his bolt with a sharp mission
of terror against the head of the perjured person
and the traitor. He presides in the forum, and
controls the debates of the senate, more appropri-
ately, but not less potently, than the collisions of
the battle-field. In a word, he is Divine Provi-
dence fully equipped, and may stand for Allah, or
“the Great Spirit,” or any other name by which
SO
100 The Natural History of Atheism.
the one true God is known among monotheistic
races, without offence, were it not for the motley
groups of grotesque figures from old traditions
hanging to his skirts, which obscure his glory, de-
grade his character, and caricature his attributes.
There is one other feature of Polytheism which,
however ambitious of brevity, we may not alto-
gether omit. It opens the chapter which plays
such a prominent part in the theology of the East,
the worship of deified niortals. Of this, as it is a
distinctive element of Buddhism, we shall treat
under a separate head; on its more moderate
manifestation in ancient Greece, a few words will
suffice here. . Now, in the first place, there can be
no doubt that whatever wonderful feats of super-
human strength Diomede, or Achilles, or any
other highly-favoured hero may perform in ancient
story, whether in virtue of his divine birth or of
special divine aid imparted for the nonce, on no
occasion did the sober-minded piety of the Greeks
ever rise into that region of devout intoxication or
exaggeration inspired by which the Aryan religion-
ists on the banks of the Ganges contrived with
such gorgeous breadth of extravagance to break
down all definite boundaries betwixt the human
and the divine; only in the case of Dionysus does
Polytheism.
IOI
some strange confusion seem to exist between a
sort of Hellenic Noah, the first brewer of sun-
breust from the vine, and the great procreant force
of nature, working always in the humid element,
from which all vegetative and animal life proceeds.
The Theban Hercules, though sometimes, in works
of art, seen in session with the gods, is no more
a god than Romulus to the Romans, or St. Igna-
tius to the Catholic Church; and if in the wealth
of strange legends that have clustered round the
name of the son of Alcmene, many scholars of
weight have seen an allegorical impersonation of
the Sun, and the process of his celestial circuit, this
may well be as an accretion to the original Theban
Hercules, imported through early Phænician agency
from Tyre or elsewhere, but does not in the least
alter the fact, that in the worship which they paid
to that hero, the Greeks were perfectly conscious
that they were paying honour to a mere man
typical man, no doubt, and a man looked up to by
the whole nation as the ideal of physical strength
wisely used and grandly put forth ; but a man still
-only a step or two of the ladder more exalted
than Theseus or Achilles. In fact, the hero-wor-
ship of the Greeks was always separated by a
distinct and palpable line of demarcation from the
-a
102 The Natural History of Atheism.
worship of the gods. As soon would a modern
publisher of an aristocratic Red-book confound a
knight of yesterday with a baron of the realm, as
a religious ancient Greek dream of elevating a
Diomede or an Achilles into the transcendental
region of a Buddha or man-god. No doubt
there were floating about in the popular mind
some strange old traditions regarding the terres-
trial sojourn, the birth and even the death of some
of the mighty Olympians. But these traditions
bore the character of vagrant anomalies and local
singularities, well calculated, certainly, to arm
the assault of a sceptical unbeliever, here and
there, but not in any wise influencing the belief
of the mass of the people. The most remark-
able of these old traditions, which seem to point to
the deification of mortal man as the true germ of
the Greek Pantheon, is that with regard to the
birth and death of Jove in the island of Crete. The
sting of this scandal, which the Church fathers
were ever forward to protrude against the Greek
idolaters, lay not in the mere legend of the king
of gods and men having had a beginning, and
having first shown himself to gods and men on a
particular spot of earth as their destined regent.
Mere birth under a human form did not present
Polytheism.
103
itself to the imagination of any pious Greek as in
any wise involving participation in the common
wants and weaknesses of frail mortality. All the
gods of the reigning dynasty had been born in
time. Apollo was born in Delos, Hermes in Ar-
cadia, while for the nativity of the Queen of
Heaven Argos and Samos put forth rival claims
with all the energy that combined piety and
patriotism could inspire. The popular theology
of Greece was not metaphysical enough to assume
an Aristotelian attitude, and inquire curiously
whether that which had a beginning might not
naturally or at least possibly come to an end. The
possibility of the dethronement of Jove from the
seat of supreme cosmic government, as in fact his
father Kronos had been dethroned before, might
be hinted for dramatic purposes, as in the well-
known Prometheus of Æschylus, but was no more
dreamt of in fact than we should think of speculat-
ing on the disappearance of the sun from the fir-
mament to-morrow, which has been gladdening us
to-day. But to say seriously that the father of
gods and men, the Supreme Immortal from whose
throne depends the golden chain that binds all
creation with a harmonious unity, to say that this
key-stone of all physical reality and all metaphysi-
104 The Natural History of Atheism.
cal consistency was historically a mere man, and a
man that had not only been born, but who died
and was buried; this in the ear of any pious Greek
was flat blasphemy, and could only have been
suggested by men like Epicurus and Diagoras of
Melos, or Lucian of Samosata, who wished to
bring the Hellenic faith into contempt. And
there can be no doubt that the man who first in
ancient times boldly and consistently maintained
the doctrine that the gods of Greece were all mere
dead men deified, meant by so doing to give the
popular religion a stab in a mortal part, from
which it could not recover. This man was a Sicil-
ian, by name Euhemerus, a philosopher of the
Cyrenaic school, and attached in some capacity,
we know not exactly what, to the Court of Cassan-
der of Macedon, the immediate successor of Alex-
ander the Great in that quarter. Of him history
tells that he made a voyage to the Red Sea, and
from that cruise and other marine wanderings
returned with a notable budget of sacred inscrip-
tions, iepaí åvarypapal, from the witness of which
he pretended to have found the mortal birth and
death of the whole existing dynasty of supposed
Olympian gods. This book, as a matter of course,
made a considerable noise in the then religious
Polytheism.
105
world ; and the author unquestionably, had he
lived in other times, and under the eye of most
religious Athens, might have got hemlock for his
sleeping-draught some night, as Socrates did for a
much smaller offence, or rather only an imagined
offence against the local orthodoxy. His escape,
so far as history notes, from all punishment, after
such a daring act of public blasphemy, is to be
accounted for, partly from the change of the times,
but in a great measure also from the fact that
books in those days were confined to a very nar-
row circle-a circle not so wide, we may imagine,
as that of the men who read Latin books in Shake-
speare's time in this country—and so a little offen-
sive talk and street-logic by a man in the social
position of Socrates at Athens a hundred years
earlier, might naturally do more to raise the cry
of atheisin against its author than a big book
launched into the literary world in the disrupted
state of Greek society that followed the Macedo-
nian conquest and partition. As to the contents
of this book, and how far they legitimately seemed
to prove a Buddhistic sort of confusion of the
human and the divine, no opinion can now be
given so long as the book is not before us. Its
popularity within a certain narrow range of scep-
5*
106 The Natural History of Atheism.
as
tically-inclined literary men, such Ennius
amongst the Romans, who translated it into Latin,
proves nothing. That some heroes of great local
significance, as the great Napoleon in France, may,
under certain circumstances, by the exaggerated
reverence paid to them in popular traditions, have
been elevated into the state and dignity of gods,
is not to be doubted; but that the Olympian
dynasty of Greece, whose elemental significance is
so transparent, should as a whole have had only
this origin, runs in the face of all probability, and
is in no wise to be believed without some substan-
tial proof, very different from that which a few
anomalous inconsistencies in the motley swarm of
local religious legends affords. We know that in
later times mortal kings sometimes took to them-
selves the title of the god whom they specially
worshipped, as was the case with that vile com-
pound of frantic fancies and disgusting vices who
once sate on the throne of imperial Rome, called
Heliogabalus. And if we suppose that a mortal
king as superior to common men, as this wretched
caricature of kingship was below it, in the earliest
ages of Greek civilisation reigning wisely and
beneficently in Crete, had the title of the local god
given to him in his lifetime, and after death in-
Polytheism.
107
scribed upon his tomb, we shall have a theory
which explains all the facts of the alleged sepul-
"ture of Jove in that island, without resorting to a
supposition at once revolting to natural piety, con-
tradicted by the speaking symbolism of the general
body of Hellenic mythology, and contrary to all
that is historically known of the development of
theological ideas in the Aryan race.
So much for this strange chapter of the deifica-
tion of dead men in ancient Greece. But flinging
the speculation of Euhemerus aside, as destitute
alike of nobility and of probability, there can be
no doubt that the religious homage actually paid
by the Greeks to such representative men as Her-
cules and Theseus (for which they used a special
word εναγίζειν as opposed to θύειν), exercised a
most elevating influence on the national character.
It was not among the heroes or demigods, but
among a certain class of the supreme Olympians
themselves, that the germs of a most degrading
moral corruption were to be found. The priest-
hood of a worship that could be represented by
such a debased sensualist as Heliogabalus might
well be exchanged for any sort of virtuous atheism;
but the national honours paid by cultivated Greece
to such names as Theseus and Hercules were one
108 The Natural History of Atheism.
step in the ladder of healthy reverence that con-
sistently leads up to GOD.
One other remark, and we close. We have
talked only of the moral influences of polytheism,
as these are in fact the most important. A super-
stition which, though founded on erroneous intel-
lectual conceptions, works practically in the main
so as to cherish the best emotions and call into
action the noblest energies of human beings, is
always better than the cold negations, blank vacui-
ties, or rabid hostilities of atheism. But there is
one danger to which a religion, the growth of mere
emotion and imagination is exposed from which its
ultimate ruin after however long a period of pros-
perity may surely be predicted. Man is a think-
ing animal as well as a feeling animal : his brain,
if not able to supply the steam-power which moves
the social machine, has nevertheless rights of in-
quiry and survey which it may not forego ; and
the breaches in the coherent structure of the the-
ology of Homer and Hesiod were so many and so
exposed, that a people far less subtle and far less
proud of their wisdom than the Greeks, in the nat-
ural progress of the popular intellect, could not
fail to use them as irresistible invitations to assaults
from the side of Reason, which no weapons drawn
Polytheism.
109
from a purely emotional and ästhetical armoury
could repel. It is only a question of delay, there-
fore, not of doubtful issue, how soon the decided
monotheistic or pantheistic polemics vigorously
started by individual independent thinkers, such as
Xenophanes of Colophon, so early as 600 B.C.,
would ripen into a general revolt, and large defec-
tion of the popular mind from the most cherished
religious traditions of their race. No religion can
stand when it comes into a position of glaring con-
trariety to the intellectual consciousness of the age.
CHAPTER V.
BUDDHISM.
Μηδείς υμάς καταβραβευέτο θέλων εν ταπεινοφροσύνη και θρησκεία
των αγγέλων, και μή εώρακεν εμβατεύων, εική φυσιούμενος υπό του νοος
της σαρκός αυτου: άτινά εστιν λόγον μέν έχοντα σοφίας εν εθελοθρη-
σκεία και ταπεινοφροσύνη και αφειδία σώματος, ουκ εν τιμή τινι προς
πλησμονήν της σαρκός. .
“Let no man beguile you of your reward, in a voluntary humility
and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he
hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.
" Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship,
and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the
satisfying of the flesh.”
ST. PAUL, Colossians ii. 18, 23.
W serange bepiphany of British atheism of
HEN I began to consider seriously the
strange epiphany of British atheism or
agnosticism, as it paraded itself publicly in the
persons of Bradlaugh, John Stuart Mill, Miss Mar-
tineau, Tyndall, and others, my attention was
naturally called to the fact—which our native
agnostics seemed to have a special delight in re-
Buddhism.
III
cognising—that in the far East atheism had been
publicly professed for more than two thousand
years, and was at present the corner-stone of the
faith of more than four hundred millions of the
human race.
A religion based upon atheism was
certainly an astounding fact-a fact, indeed, un-
intelligible, and according to the common use of
language, self-contradictory. To my understand-
ing, at least, it seems as meaningless to talk of
religion without God, as to talk of the propositions
in Euclid without the postulates on which they
depend. But this was not all. Contrary to all
human instincts, except perhaps the instincts of
that Siamese pair, Mr. Atkinson and Miss Mar-
tineau, the Buddhists, we were informed, delight-
ed in the idea of annihilation; and to be entirely
blotted out from the world of conscious existences
was, to their devout imaginations, the ideal of
human bliss. Absurd and abnormal as these
notions might seem to be, it was in vain to brusli
them aside, as one might flap away an army of
impertinent flies, or stop the ear to the maunder-
ing babble of some adjacent bedlam. Here stood
the fact: next door to us at Calcutta in the East,
four hundred millions of reasonable beings profess-
ing a belief in a doctrine essentially unreasonable,
112 The Natural History of Atheism.
and contradicting, as often as they draw their
breath, the primary instincts of all living creatures
in this Western hemisphere of the globe. It was
a matter manifestly that demanded inquiry; and
there was at the same time the best reason to be-
lieve that the broad statement of these monstrous
doctrines, as it was circulated among the sober
Europeans, would require to be modified consider-
ably, perhaps altogether inverted before it could
be accepted as a philosophical account of the real
state of oriental belief. For not only is it a patent
fact that the professors of hostile creeds generally
misunderstand and misrepresent each other; but
the whole method of religious and philosophical
thinking in the East is so opposed to the currency
of the logical conceptions in the West, that a fair
appreciation of such a phenomenon as Buddhism
was not to be looked for in the first instance as
possible by Europeans; least of all by the English-
man, who disowns all philosophy, and by the Scot,
whose philosophy in that deeper region where it
becomes identical with theology, is remarkably
rigid, narrow, and unsympathetic. I therefore
determined, with the help of Williams's Sanscrit
Dictionary, Childer's Pali Dictionary, and a selec-
tion of the best original works on the subject, of
Buddhism.
II3
which the name is now legion,* to get to the root
of the matter, as far, at least, as that might be
possible to a person not versed in the languages
of the Buddhist Scriptures; and, when I consider-
ed how truly the spirit of Christianity has been
seized by hundreds of thousands of persons who
never knew anything but modern versions of the
Christian Scriptures, I saw no reason to doubt
that I might succeed in the attempt. For though
profound philological knowledge is necessary to
the interpretation of difficult passages, and the
solution of a few knotty points, the main character
of a religious or philosophical system will shine
out from a fair translation as clearly as from the
original Scriptures. Such things, indeed, always
are discerned, as St. Paul teaches (1 Cor. ii.
14–16), more by spiritual sympathy than by in-
tellectual analysis. Have the spiritual sympathy,
and plant yourself-a thing not to be done with-
out considerable effort sometimes on the native
point of view; and a sensible man . will ofttimes
come closer to the soul of any religious system
* See “Buddha and his Doctrines; by Otto Kistner,” Leipzig
and London, 1869, and since that date the articles BUDDHISM and
BRAHMINISM, in the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica,
by scholars of note; also the admirable little book on Buddhism,
by T. W. Rhys DAVIDS, London, 1877.
114 The Natural History of Atheism.
than if he had devoured all the commentaries of
all the libraries. Nine-tenths, indeed, of all com-
mentaries are mere impertinent babble of persons
who had no vocation to speak; which, if it were
stowed away altogether into an oblivious lumber-
room, would clear the atmosphere wonderfully,
and save not a little trouble.
Chronology and accurate history are well known
to be the weak points of the Hindoo literature : so
we must not expect to start with any very well-
marked and formally authenticated memoirs of the
great Reformer of the Brahmanic religion. Never-
theless, the main facts of the life of Buddha stand
out distinctly enough, magnified no doubt through
the mist of distant tradition, and worked all over
with the gorgeous decorations of an unchastened
and unscrupulous fancy, but clearly there—except
perhaps to the eyes of some of those Teutonic idea-
mongers, whose brains so swarm with ingenious
fictions that they have no room left for facts. We
live, happily, in a generation, when even King
Arthur, once, consigned to the limbo of all the
myths, is being restored to his personality; and
so we may with all certainty take our stand on the
fact that the celebrated Gotama Muni, who is now
worshipped as the supreme object of veneration by
Buddhism.
115
all the Buddhists of the East, was born a prince of
the Sakya race in the Gangetic of Hindostan,
about 100 miles N.E. of Benares, some six hun-
dred years before our era. The exact date, like
the age of Homer, is disputed, and likely to re-
main so; but, if we follow the Ceylonese authori-
ties, who profess Buddhism in its oldest and pu-
rest form, we shall place this Luther of the Eastern
Church somewhere in the sixth century before
Christ-cotemporary with Solon, the Athenian
lawgiver; Thales, the Milesian philosopher; and
the Etruscan dynasty of the Tarquins in Rome.
His original name was Siddartha; and his father,
Suddhodana, as was to be expected, took all possi-
ble care that his son should be trained in all those
arts and accomplishments which belong to a great
Eastern prince and the ruler of a mighty empire.
But fathers are often disappointed when they plan
the destinies of their offspring, especially when
those sons have a large stock of that rare stuff in
the human family, whose nature it is to shape cir-
cumstances rather than to be shaped by them. In
this case the destiny of the royal Celtic saint, St.
Columba, was prefigured; the young Siddartha,
though surrounded with every splendour that
could attract, and every pleasure that could allure,
116 The Natural History of Atheism.
would not be contained within the charmed circle
of a Court life. To him a Court was only a splen-
did confinement, and what the Court called pleas-
ure only a more elegant sort of animalism. He
felt himself to be more than an animal; he was a
thinker; besides he had a hunger of human love
in his bosom, swelling with heavings, to which
neither the blaze of gold in an Indian palace, nor
the allurements of sensuous delight in a harem of
the choicest Oriental beauties, could minister any
nourishment. So he broke the golden bars of that
prison one day, and told his coachman, Tchandaka,
to harness his chariot and to drive out beyond the
precincts of the palace, to see what might be found
there. Now, the king could not prevent this : but
being haunted by a fear from some family predic-
tion that his son might one day manifest a distaste
for public life, and desert the throne for a her-
mitage, he caused the whole district within the
range of the prince's possible drive to be cleared
of every unpleasant or unsightly object that might
possibly divert the thoughts of his son from the
splendours and luxuries of a Court life. But all
his precautions were in vain. On three several
occasions, when the prince rode out, he saw specta-
cles of human misery, such as could not be seen
Buddhism.
117
by a man naturally of the most unselfish character
without opening the door to a current of the most
serious reflections. He saw-so the Chinese book
has it-"in one of the streets the body of an old,
decrepit man; his skin shrivelled up, his head
bald, his teeth gone, his body bent down. He
carried a staff in his hand to support his tottering
limbs; whilst, as he proceeded, he gasped with
pain, and the breath from his mouth sounded, as
it came, like the raspings of a saw.” *
And then,
on inquiry, he was informed by the coachman that
this was by no means a singular spectacle, but the
common lot of all, prince as well as peasant, who
might live unharmed till such time as their life
found its natural termination. Whereupon the
prince replied: “If this be so, I cannot think of
proceeding farther whither we were going to sport
and laugh. Turn your horses homeward : let us
return to the palace ; it were better for me to pass
my time in thinking how to contrive to escape, or
at least to palliate this end of AGE.” On his sec-
* The romantic legend of Sakya Buddha, from the Chinese by
Samuel Beal. London: Tribman, 1875, p. 109. This book,
though of Chinese manufacture, is founded on Sanscrit traditions,
and may be relied on as giving a true idea of what Buddhists gener-
ally believe, or are taught to believe, of the great founder of their
religion,
118 The Natural History of Atheism.
ond excursion, he encountered on the roadside-
whether naturally or by the glamoury of a deva-
putra, angel, or genius, does not matter a sick
and pain-worn man, . with cramped limbs and
swollen belly, giving evidence of agonising suffer-
ing, pale and miserable, scarcely able to draw his
breath, and every now and then lying down in the
dirt through exhaustion."
And this spectacle pro-
duced a similar effect. Lastly, on a third excur-
sion, a deva-putra caused to appear directly in his
path“ a corpse on a bier. Then he saw the people
lift up the bier and carry it along, some spreading
grass upon it; whilst on the right and left were
weeping women tearing their hair and beating their
breasts with grief; others striking their heads
across either arm; others throwing dust on their
heads; others wailing and lamenting, and weeping
tear-drops fast as rain, with such sad and bitter
cries as could seldom be heard. Was this also
part of the common lot? Yes, replied the coach-
man: peer and peasant, sacred bodies and profane, ,
must equally die. Then finally said the prince :
If this be really so, and this body-of mine must die,
and become even as this corpse, what have I to do
with pleasure, or why should I go to the garden
to find enjoyment? Turn again, O coachman !
Buddhism.
119
turn again your chariot! and take me back to the
palace, that I may meditate on what you have
said. Then the prince entered the palace again,
and sat silently down and pondered on death and
the impermanency of all things." *
I have quoted this vision of the three woes almost
at full length, because it shows better than the most
cunning style of portraiture could what manner of
man we have to do with. We have to do with a
man of the most exquisite moral sensibility—a
man who could no more bear to see sorrow of any
kind, without devoting himself to its extirpa-
tion or alleviation, than a hungry man can forbear
to crave for food. Hundreds and thousands of
people in the West End of London see such spec-
tacles readily, but are not so moved ; a passing
“
"poor wretch !” or a superfluous sixpence flung
on the ground, to be picked up by a half-naked
suppliant, settles the score of their pity. They
make the round of the Row in the sunshine ; eat
their dinner with sunset from gorgeous plates
enamelled with sky-blue, and edged with gold ;
and after due potations of champagne, port, or
burgundy, as the case may be, sally out, through
the dark, to the splendour of a dancing-saloon,
* Beal as above, p. 119.
I 20 The Natural History of Atheism.
where they remain, tripping it deftly with the
young and light-hearted through the small hours
of the morning, till their body, with such pro-
longed exercitation, is exhausted, but with a per-
fectly easy conscience. Now, I do not say that
these gay people are doing anything wrong-quite
the contrary; I like to see gay people ; it is
natural and healthy to be gay ; but what falls
here to be remarked is simply this, that these
fashionable West-Enders, living from week to
week and from night to night, with perfect con-
tent, in what is called the gay world, are not per-
sons of Sakya Muni's extreme moral sensibility.
The illustrious Prince of the Sakyan race could not
see these things and dance, He could not laugh,
while his brother was weeping. The sorrow of his
fellow-men, as it fell down in big briny drops,
mingled with his cup of pleasure, and turned it
into gall. From that moment he became a sad
and a solitary man. His destiny was now fixed.
He must seek a way of escape. What might
come out of it he did not know; but he could not
remain longer where he was. He must seek in
solitude for balm to that deep heart-wound which
society might hide, but could not heal. He
determined to leave the Court and become after
Buddhism.
I21
the fashion of Brahmanic piety, a dweller in the
lonely glens, a recluse. Through desire a man
having separated himself, seeketh and inter-
meddleth with all wisdom.” So said Solomon ;
and what the Hebrew king said, the Hindoo
prince did to the extreme letter.
This retiring into the forest, and living the life
of a pious hermit and mendicant devotee, is the
second significant fact in the career of this singu-
lar religionist. He was a philanthropist of the
extreme type, and a monk of the Oriental type ;
and, if the first is always a rare virtue, the latter is
certainly a not uncommon folly. To plunge from
one extreme to another, overleaping the mean of
moderation and just equipoise, is the common
weakness of humanity, which wise men in all ages
have studied to diminish, but have in vain en-
deavoured to prevent. The rebound from ex-
treme sensuality to extreme spirituality-from
wasteful splendour to parsimonious bareness-
from the plethora of enjoyment to total abstinence,
is exemplified in the lives of hundreds of saints
and religious persons all over the world, and need
not be commented on here. If even in the sober
breast of European Christians such sudden revul-
sions of feeling and inversions of mortal habitude
6
122 The Natural History of Atheism.
are not uncommon, how natural that they should
appear with gigantic proportions in the over-
charged religiosity of the East !
The extreme form which moral mortification and
religious self-denial delights to assume in the East
will be best understood by observing the procedure
of Sakya Muni after he left the palace. The first
thing he does is to take off from his royal head-
dress the precious Mani pearl, and giving it to the
faithful Tchandaka, thus addressed him :-
“Tchandaka, I now give you this precious Mani pearl, and bid
you return with it to my father Suddhôdana Maharaja ; and when
arrived in his presence, after due salutation, bid him dismiss all
grief or useless regrets on my account ; assure him that I am in-
fluenced by no delusion in leaving him thus, nor by any angry or
resentful feeling; tell him that I seek no personal gain or profit by
what I do, that I look for no reward-not even to be born in heaven
—but that I seek solely the benefit of men (all flesh), to bring back
those who have wandered from the right path, to enlighten those
who are living in dark and gloomy error, to save them from the
constant recurrence of birth and death, to remove from the world.
all sources of sorrow and pain-for these purposes I have left my
home; and so my loving Father, seeing me thus rejoicing in carrying
out this purpose, should shake off every feeling of regret and sorrow
on my account.”
After this he draws his sword from its sheath,
and cuts off his rosy, curling locks, and, not con-
tent with that, causes a hairdresser with a razor to
appear, and make a clean shave of all the hairy
Buddhism.
123
vesture of his poll ; and, to complete the meta-
morphosis, he takes off his splendid purple robe,
and puts on a“ dirty and much-soiled kashyn gar-
ment.” Being thus shorn and disrobed, he took
a solemn oath that he should no longer be known
as Prince Siddartha, but by no other name than
Muni, or the Recluse.
Undisturbed by the rattle of busy life, and un-
seduced by the attractions of sensual pleasure and
light frivolities, in the solitude of the forest the
thoughtful prince had now full leisure to brood
over the sins and sorrows of humanity, and to
think out a plan of salvation. Converts of the
common stamp do not take long to excogitate their
remedy for the moral diseases of humanity: they
take it as they find it in the traditional orthodox
forms of their country, and, after going through a
course of thorough personal reformation, often
dash into a fervid apostleship with the ready-made
shibboleths of their creed, applied in the lump, and
with no attempt at discrimination, to all and sun-
dry of the unconverted multitude. Apostles of
this class may be found anywhere in these islands ;
especially in Scotland, where they make the street
corners and the public squares to re-echo with their
earnest, shrill appeals to the careless sinners of the
124 The Natural History of Atheisń.
passing crowd. But the Sakyan prince had a more
difficult work to do. He could not accept the
Brahmanic way of salvation simply as he found it;
nay, rather, he saw in that whole sacerdotal system
a Pharisaic pride, a narrow exclusiveness, a shallow
ceremonialism, and a super-subtle theology, which
repulsed him; from which certainly he could not
hope to educe any catholic remedy for the wide-
spread miseries of human life. He had therefore
to fashion forth a system, chiefly ethical, but partly
also metaphysical, for himself; and this he is repre-
sented as having done during a space of seven
years, without any help from man or God. His
system, if not particularly original in its matter-
for moral truth is everywhere the same—was, or at
least claimed to be, altogether original in its pro-
duction. The wells of living water, in his case,
flowed altogether from within, were the pure issue
of severe and long-continued meditation and com-
munion with his own heart in the leafy solitudes.
After having excogitated his doctrine, the next
desire, of course, in a character possessed with his
grand rage for humanity, was to promulgate the
way of salvation to his fellows; but in the threshold
of this purpose, he is represented as overwhelmed
with blank despair when he thinks of the stupidity
Buddhism.
I 25
and sinfulness of the creatures whom he is attempt-
ing to convert. * This was a natural enough temp-
tation, felt no doubt by all, more or less, who have
made any serious attempt towards the reformation
of their fellow-men ; but men of John Wesley's or
Sakya Muni's type will not allow themselves ulti-
mately to be turned back from a great moral enter-
prise by cowardly considerations of this kind ; and
accordingly we find that when he was wrestling
with such discouraging imaginations, Maha Brahma
and Indra, two of the mightiest of the Hindoo gods,
visited him in the forest, and persuaded him forth-
with to commence an apostleship for the conversion
of benighted mortals. Thus strengthened, he girt
himself to the task of world-regeneration. His first
attempts were made at Magadha, where, however,
he met with little success; † but at the sacred city
of Benares, whither he next bent his steps, he made
his first five disciples; and from that germ the
apostleship began to burgeon and blossom forth
with notable success. Unassisted at first by the
civil power, and, of course, with much opposition
from the Pharisaic priesthood, and the devotees of
their ceremonialism, the pure moral doctrine of
* « Études Buddhiques,” par St. Leon Feer, Paris, 1870, p. 7.
+ Feer, p. 25.
126 The Natural History of Atheism.
Sakya Muni, now called Buddha,* made a conquest
of the multitude, like Christianity, mainly by the
catholic humanity of its inspiration, and by the
noble self-denying character of its author. In the
course of time, however, just as Christianity was
placed on a strong ground of vantage by Constan-
tine in the year 323, so the great Buddhistic heresy
received the stamp of secular respectability from
the Emperor Asoka about the middle of the third
century B.C.
In this manner the grain of mustard seed, after
the usual fashion of all great moral reforms, had
grown into a great tree, and might under favoura-
ble circumstances have, in the course of time, pre-
vailed so far as utterly to extirpate Brahmanism
from the whole district between the Indus and the
Ganges; but it was not so. After generations of
hateful reproach and humiliation from their upstart
antagonists, the Brahmans found themselves strong
enough to expel the Buddhists from India, just as
Protestantism was expelled from the south of
Europe by the combined conservatism of Italy,
Spain, France, and Austria. But here, as in the
The words Buddha and Boddha are the Sanscrit forms of the
Greek orda and the Latin video, signifying knowledge or spiritual
insight. Plato's opóvnous. The German wissen and the English
wit and wot are obvious variations of the same root.
Buddhism.
127
obvious parallel of Christianity, persecution and
banishment served only to spread the seed of the
doctrine, and to ennoble the character of its mis-
sionaries; and the gospel of Sakya Muni made
moral conquest of millions of human souls through
the extensive regions of Ceylon, Burmah, China,
Thibet, and Japan, which amply compensated for
its total disappearance in its original seats on the
banks of the Ganges and the Jumna.
So much for the outward scene, and the exter-
nal fates of this most notable type of oriental piety.
Let us now look steadily on its internal character
and moral features. We have mentioned already,
what is agreed on all hands, that the Buddistic
system must be regarded as a protest against the
extreme sacerdotalism of the existing Brahmanic
system,* and in this respect there is a perfect
analogy between the position of Buddha as a re-
ligious reformer, and that of Christ in his antago-
nism to the Pharisees, as also that of Martin Luther
in his opposition to the Roman hierarchy. There
is, however, this important difference to be observed
* It is noteworthy, in this view, that in choosing his form of
incarnation, the destined Buddha chooses to be born in the secular
caste of Kshatryas, or warriors, rejecting the sacerdotal type of the
Brahmins. Beal, p. 30.
128 The Natural History of Atheism.
between Buddha and these two cases : Buddha
rejected altogether, or at least ignored, the whole
strictly theological foundation of the Brahmanic
creed which was his cradle ; whereas, the mono-
theism of the Hebrews, with all its accompani-
ments, passed unquestioned into Christianity, as
did likewise the theology of the Christian
Churches, always of course with the exception of
some later Roman excrescences, into the Protestant-
ism of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingle. What Bud-
dha preached was a gospel of pure human ethics,
divorced not only from Brahma and the Brahmanic
Trinity, but even from the existence of God : so
that, while his moral discourses come upon the ear,
in many respects, like an echo of the Sermon on
the Mount, there is one sentence in that sermon
which could not possibly occur in any of Buddha's
exhortations. "BE YE THEREFORE PERFECT,
EVEN AS YOUR FATHER WHO IS IN HEAVEN IS
PERFECT"_whereas the constant and consistent
voice of the Indian Messiah was, BE YE THERE-
FORE PERFECT, EVEN AS I, BUDDHA, AM PERFECT.
And in this view, we may certainly say that the
preaching of Buddha, viewed as to its contents,
was not so much a religion as a philosophy; a
philosophy, however, published according to
Buddhism.
I 29
popular belief, not by a vulgar mortal like Zeno,
or Marcus Antoninus, but by an altogether tran-
scendental personage, or god-man, who, if he did
not worship any Being higher than himself, as he
seems certainly, according to sacred tradition, not
to have done, could not avoid being worshipped
by the millions of mortals whom his teaching re-
deemed, or seemed to have redeemed, from earthly
sin and sorrow and shame into a state of holiness,
peace of mind, and unspeakable beatitude.
Let us now state under distinct heads the main
points of his doctrine, philosophical and ethical ;
for, though he had no theology, strictly so called,
as a thinking man he could not avoid entertaining
certain opinions about human life and man's posi-
tion on the earth, out of which, as from a root,
his moral system grew into shape.
And in the first place here we encounter the
startling doctrine that existence, at least such ex-
istence as human beings brook on this earth, is an
evil, not a good. The conditions of human life,
according to Buddha, necessarily imply evil; and
therefore to get rid of evil we must get rid of
human life altogether, at least of human life under
its present limitations and degrading conditions.
The four evils under which the whole creation
6*
130 The Natural History of Atheism.
groaneth even until now are BIRTH, OLD AGE,
DISEASE, and DEATH; and these must be abso-
lutely and altogether swept out of the account,
before anything like a reasonable happiness can be
expected to arise. Christianity was content, in St.
Paul's language, to take away the sting from
death, and victory from the grave; but the Indian
transcendentalist will not be content with any such
vulgar ambition ; he must" save all flesh from the
fearful ocean of birth and death." * This extraordi-
nary dogma, which sounds as monstrous to a sane
ear as the stoical paradox that pain is no evil, and
pleasure no good, becomes intelligible only when
viewed in the light of the doctrine of transmigra-
tion of souls-a doctrine which lies at the root of
all oriental anthropology, just as the fall of man
does in the theological system of our Christian
Churches. By the fall of man, as theologians
teach, the human race lies under a curse, and, so
long as this curse remains, life, though enjoyed in
a low way by unregenerate persons, is in reality
a curse rather than a blessing; and becomes a
blessing only to those who are redeemed from the
curse by faith in Christ Jesus and the moral regen-
eration produced through that faith. The ori-
* Beal, p. 137
Buddhism.
131
ental theology, while it abstains from tracing the
sorrows of the race to a federal head, derives the
"sorrows of the individual from sins of the indivi-
dual committed in a previous stage, or rather
many previous stages of existence; and the only
way to get rid of them is by accumulating such
an amount of moral merit, in various successive
existences, as may enable the virtuous person to
rise at last above all conditions of sorrowful human
existence into a super-mundane state of uncon-
ditioned beatitude, in the Sanscrit language tech-
nically termed NIRWANA. Seen from this tran-
scendental point of view, human existence, in the
exaggerated language familiar to the East, may be
said to be an undesirable thing, and a curse rather
than a blessing; at all events as only a somewhat
uncomfortable stage in a long journey full of stages
more or less uncomfortable, and on no occasion
creating the feeling of a happy home. What are
called the pleasures of life, in this view, are all
more or less delusions, of which a wise man should
get rid as soon as possible : life itself, with all its
gay parade and glittering show, is, from this higher
point of view, a delusion; it is all fleeting and
momentary, and possesses no permanency which a
man can firmly grasp; it is a hollow vanity; and
132 The Natural History of Atheism.
the sting of the curse which belongs to it lies
mainly here, that its most vaunted pleasures are
its most deadly poisons, and its most florid flush
of health a veil for rottenness in the bones.
So much for the curse of human life. How
now are we to get rid of it ?-only in one way,
just as you would get rid of a house on fire ; run
out by the back door, or let yourself down from a
window, as may happen to be practicable. To
escape from the miseries of human life, we must as
far as possible withdraw ourselves from the great
current, struggle, and contest of the world; we
must mortify our desires, control our passions,
practise moderation in all things and abstinence in
not a few, and generally cultivate a lofty indiffer-
ence to vulgar human interests, and a spirit of
serene quietude far beyond and above the turbid
tides and gusty storms of passion that fill the
hearts of men with fret, disappointment, and de-
spair.
The student of the moral and religious history
of society will recognise that he has nothing here
but stoicism, tinged with a very strong touch of
oriental asceticism, and rooted in certain strange
transcendental notions about the pre-existence and
post-existence of human souls. But in addition to
Buddhism.
133
this lofty stoicism and philosophic indifference to
the petty passions and troubles of human life, we
have in Buddha the evangelic element of doing
good to others-the missionary spirit, what Dr.
Chalmers used to call the aggressive attitude of
Christianity. Retirement from the world; soli-
tary meditation on the realities of the moral life,
and the fleeting nature of all sensuous shows and
pleasures ; self-control and self-restraint ;
-and
active benevolence; these four chapters contain
all that is practically significant in the ethics of
Buddhism, and which, in fact, do not differ mate-
rially from Christian ethics, except in the self-con-
tainedness and self-assertiveness of their transcen-
dental stoicism. But it will give vividness to the
picture, if we add a few passages of their ethical
teaching in their own language. The vision of the
three great sorrows which, as we have seen, were
the means of leading the Sakyan prince to serious
thinking, was succeeded on another occasion by a
fourth apparition, which is narrated in the Chinese
book as follows:
"Then the prince, having set out on his excursion, the Devapu-
tra by his spiritual power caused to appear, not far in front of the
chariot, a man with a shaven crown and wearing a Sañg hati robe,
with his right shoulder barc, in his right hand a religious staff, in
134 The Natural History of Atheism.
CON-
his left hand holding a mendicant's alms bowl, and so going with
measured pace
. along the road. The prince having observed this
figure before him, asked the coachman—Dear Coachman ! who is
this man in front of me, proceeding with such slow and dignified
steps, looking neither to the right nor the left, with fixed attention,
his head shaven, his garments of a reddish earthen colour, unlike
the white-clad mendicants, his alms dish too of a purplish shining
hue, like the stone s toi"?'
." Then the Devaputra T'so-Ping excited the coachman to an-
swer thus—Holy youth and illustrious prince! this person is call-
ed a mendicant (parivråjika).'
“ Then the prince asked again, 'And what is the calling and con-
duct of a mendicant?
“ The coachman answered, Great prince ! this man
stantly practises virtue, and avoids wrong ; he gives himself to
charity, and restrains his appetites and his bodily desires; he is in
agreenient with all men, and hurts nobody, neither killing nor
poisoning any one ; but, as far as he can, he does good to all, and
is full of synpathy for all. Prince ! for this reason he is called a
mendicant.' 'If this be so,' said the prince, and he is of such a dis-
position, drive up to him, o coachman ! and let me speak to him.'
This done, the prince addressed the mendicant and said, 'Honour-
ed Sir ! tell me, I pray you, what man you are !' At this time the
Devaputra T'so-Ping by his spiritual power caused him to answer
thus— Great Prince! I am called a mendicant ! ' And what is
that ?' inquired the prince. It is one,' the mendicant rejoined,
who has left the world and its ways, who has forsaken friends
and home in order to find deliverance for himself, and desires
nothing so much as by some expedient or other to give life to all
creatures and to do harm to none; for this reason, o prince! I
am called a mendicant (parivråjika, homeless one).'
" Then the prince, resuming the conversation said, 'Venerable
one ! and what is the character of the preparation necessary for
arriving at this condition?' (To which the mendicant replied),
' Illustrious youth ! if you are able to behold (or regard) all objects
of sense (sansara) (or the Samskåras, vide Introd., p. 505, n.) as
impermanent, to think no evil and do none; but, on the contrary,
Buddhism.
135
to benefit all creatures (by your life and teaching) then this will lead
to the condition of a mendicant; as the Gâtha says-
“To regard all earthly things as perishable;
To desire above all things the condition of Nirvana,
Done with hatred or love, the heart equally affected,
Freed from all earthly objects of desire ;
Frequenting the solitary pits or forests or beneath a tree,
Or dwelling on the cold earth in the place of tombs,
Thoroughly emancipated from all personal consideration,
This is the way to regard the character of a mendicant.' ""
Here it will be observed that the ideal of the
Buddhist saint is a monk; a feature in which it
differs essentially both from Christianity and Hel-
lenic stoicism, of which the ideal was an active
life: a reasonable harmony with a reasoned uni-
verse, according to Zeno; a faith in the Divine
government of the world, working by love, ac-
cording to St. Paul.
In reply to a seductive band of female beauties,
who had been sent by Mara, the evil spirit or
Hindoo devil, to turn him from his purpose of a
holy life, Boddhi-satva—that is, the hermit-prince
with the destiny of complete Buddhaship in his
breast,-is represented as using the following lan-
guage:-
“ All those pleasures in which the world indulges
Are sources of sorrow, sin, and distress!
By reason of this, the worldling loses all spiritual discernment;
136 The Natural History of Atheism.
Clouded with ignorance, he lives in darkness and gloom.
Men are never satisfied with the enjoyment of these things,
But I long ago have utterly discarded them, and escaped from
their slavery.
As a man flees from a burning furnace, or a poisonous drug;
I have long since given up these sources of sorrow.
I have tasted of the water of eternal wisdom;
My heart enlightened, I desire to enlighten others,
And to declare the doctrine of the most excellent law.
But if I were to partake of these polluting pleasures,
Then I should in the end fail to attain wisdom,
For it is by continuing in these deceitful pleasures,
That a man acquires the infection of folly and sin,
Neither profitable to himself nor able to profit others;
I, therefore, desire not these things I cast them away.
It is these pleasures that burn up all living things,
Even as the fire at the end of time burns the world.
They are perishable as the bubble that rises on the water,
Light as a dream, unreal as a phantom,
Hollow and false, deceiving the worldly-wise ;
But the man of true wisdom finds no delight therein.
Just as you see the child with his fellows
Playing and polluting himself with filth,
So is the ignorant and besotted man polluted by these ;
He sees the dazzling sheen of the jewelled trinket,
And forth with there arises in him a covetous desire.
That hair of yours which grows from the brain,
What pollution, sores, and ulcers it generates;
Your teeth, that are secretly shed one by one;
Your lips and nose and mouth and eyes,
They are but as the bubble for permanence.
Your waist and loins, your buttocks and hams,
What pollution is here, proceeding from the blood;
And what impurities, the effect of indulgence.
The man who delights in these is foolish
As one who makes a millstone to grind his own body.
And therefore every one who is wise,
Buddhism.
137
Distinguishing these matters, as I have shown,
Will reject and forsake all such false delights.
He will behold his body, day and night circulating its blood,
As the receptacle of that which is unclean, and find no joy in be-
holding it.
So it is I see you, standing before my eyes
As a phantom, a dream, an unreal appearance-
For all things spring from connection of cause and effect,
These pleasures are in themselves false and delusive;
By these, men are drawn away from the path of happiness,
And led captive along the ways of misery-
They are as a fiery furnace,
As vessels full of poison-
As the head of an angry snake not to be touched,
The causes of ignorance and delusion and death;
Whoever tampers, then, with these,
Deserting the path of purity and wisdom,
Shall in the end, without doubt, perish in Hell.
So, then, having let go these things, and forsaken them,
I am now free as the air or as space, which cannot be bound with
a chain, etc.”
After these two passages it seems'unnecessary
to enlarge further on the special character of Bud-
dhistic morality. That it is remarkably pure, and
in much of its tincture and tone closely reflecting
the ethics of the Gospel, especially as they are
manifested in the organism of the Romish Church,
is sufficiently evident. It aimed to be perfectly
successful, and, no doubt, in the person of its
founder was perfectly successful in achieving the
practice of self-restraint, of great patience and
endurance, of fearless courage, and victorious voli-
138 The Natural History of Atheism.
tion. It succeeded in the annihilation of all covet-
ousness; by the renunciation of property and
women every other abstinence was rendered easy,
and the negative morality achieved its most com-
plete triumph ; * lust and strife and anger, and all
the painful twinges of doubt in the bosom of the
unstable and double-minded, disappeared. The
innumerable evils that proceed from the aggres-
siveness of selfish passion, and the lust of appro-
priation, were cut off by the root; the various
forms of cruelty practised by man to man, and
towards the brute creation, found no place among
the disciples of the pure and perfect Buddha; and,
on the other hand, whatever highest pleasures
flowed from the habitual exercise of the benevolent
affections were theirs in full measure, whose greed
was not fed by the desire of accumulation, and
whose ambition was not stimulated by the love of
power.
We now come to that special point in the Bud-
dhistic doctrine which occasioned its being woven
into the tissue of these papers; viz. its alleged
ATHEISM. And, in order to clear up this matter,
we must start with a distinction in all such cases
* Feer, P. 34-37.
Buddhism,
139
too apt to be forgotten : the distinction between
the religious belief and personal convictions of the
founder of a creed, and the belief of those who
accept him as the prophet of that creed. Some-
times, no doubt, these two beliefs may be the
same; as when Mahomet preached that there is
one God and Mahomet is his prophet, this sen-
tence contained the pith both of his personal creed
and of the faith of his orthodox followers. But
the case of Buddha, as we shall see, is different;
he was a great deal more than a prophet; a rare,
exceptional, and altogether transcendental incar-
nation of moral perfection; and in such case it
might well be, or rather by necessity was, that the
creed of the disciples contained at least one im-
portant article more than the creed of their
master, In what exact terms the historical Bud-
dha expressed his atheism or agnosticism we have
no evidence; but the omission of all direct
acknowledgment of a great original First Cause,
the supreme object of worship, in the legendary
accounts, as well as the whole tone and spirit of
the sacred traditions afford moral evidence of the
most satisfactory kind that Buddha acknowledged
no being superior to himself; scarcely, indeed,
could have done so, consistently with the tran-
140 The Natural History of Atheism.
scendental excellence which his followers believed
to be inherent in his personality. In the Chinese
version of the traditions there is only one occasion
on which Buddha is represented as praying to any
heavenly Powers; and this occasion was on his
entrance on a religious life, when, of course, he
was far from perfection. As he left the palace,
and bade final adieu to all the pleasures of sense,
" he stood at the eastern door with closed hands,"
says the book, "and invoked all the Buddhas,"
or, as it has sometimes been translated, the Uni-
versal Spirit : “after which, raising his head, he
looked up into heaven and beheld the countless
stars of the night. But this text is not sufficient
to prove that Buddha acknowledged a Supreme
Cause in the theological sense of the word, much
less that he was in the habit of offering up p.rayers
to any such god of gods. There were devas and
gods enough in the popular belief, powerful devas
and devils too, as the sacred legends abundantly
show, but they could be no objects of worship to
a being of such transcendental excellence as Bud-
dha, rather by their very nature could only minis-
ter to him, as the angels to Christ in the Garden
of Gethsemane. As a religious reformer, we have
18*
* Beal, p. 131.
Buddhism.
141
said that Buddha was not merely a devotee and a
philanthropist, but a thinker and a philosopher,
and in this capacity we have it distinctly on record
that he either did not admit the existence of what
the Hindoos call ISHWARA-a Supreme Creator,
—or at least refused to admit such an idea as
a fundamental notion in the gospel by which he
was to redeem the world from sin and misery.
There is a remarkable conversation on this subject
between him and Alara, one of the great doctors
of the Brahmanic theology, which deserves to be
read with particular attention. It is as follows:-
" The discourse then proceeds to a consideration of the power
called self-existence (Isvara), and the consequent possibility of
creation. Bôdhisatwa objects to creation by Isvara, because then
there could be no succession of events, no causes of sorrow, no
variety of Gods, but all men would regard Isvara as their Father-
there could be no disputes about this very subject, whether Isvara
exists or not—in short, if Isvara created all things, then all things
must have been Good, and there could have been no possibility of evil.
"On this, Alara commends the great wisdom of Bôdhisatwa, but
deprecates further discussion on the ground that unless there be a
power beyond ourselves capable of creating and sustaining the world,
that the great problem of the source of evil or trouble can never be
solved; for he said, either Karma or the Body existed first-if
Karma was not caused by the previous existence of the body, then
who made it, and whence came it ? But if the body existed before
Karma, then it existed independently of it. In either case there
must have been a Creator,
" To which Bôdhisatwa replied, 'I dispute not with you on this
ground, but as a man who participates in the great mass of evil
142 The Natural History of Atheism.
which exists, I seek only a physician to give me health, I throw no
further difficulties in the way.'
Vien this, one of the ascetics greatly commends Bôdhisatwa, on
the ground that all religious disputes and controversies, where the
object is victory only, certainly lead to hatred and greater evils than
any good they can effect.
666 But although,' Bôdhisatwa says, 'I desire not to wrangle,
nevertheless I seek a condition of escape that admits of no return
to life and its troubles ;' on which Alara speaks of his system as
teaching this. • But how?' enquires Bôdhisatwa, 'at one moment
you speak of your discipline leading to a definite condition of Being
(bhuva), and the next you say it admits of no return—this is
strange.'
6. And so it is,' said Alara, "for this condition of which I speak
is that of the Great Brahma, whose substantial existence is one of
perfect quietude, without beginning, without end ; without bounds
or limits, no first or last, his operations inexhaustible, his form
without parts or marksmimmutable, incorruptible.'
66. But if this be so,' said Bôdhisatwa, 'what becomes of him,
and who is He when at the end of the Kalpa, this heaven and
earth, even up to the abode of Sakra, is burnt up and entirely de-
stroyed--where then is
your
Creator?)
" Alara remained silent, with a quiet smile on his lips, whilst one
of his disciples greatly commended the wisdom of Bôdhisatwa, but
reminded him that in old time the great Rishis all attained perfect
wisdom in the way described by Alara—for instance (here follows
a list of Rishis), all of whom entered into the brightness of the sun,
and attained the straight path.
“What then is this “entering into the brightness of the sun ? "
enquired Bôdhisatwa, and if I worship these, how can I admit
the idea of an Isvara or Supreme God, who alone deserves wor-
ship?' Then the conviction seized Bôdhisatwa, that this system of
Alara could not be a final and complete exhibition of deliverance,
and his heart became sad.
- Alara perceiving this, rose from his seat and addressed Bod-
hisatwa, What then is the system of deliverance, beyond the one I
have illustrated, after which you look ?'
Buddhism.
143
" To which Bôdhisatwa replied, “I seek a system in which ques-
tions about the elements shall have no place—in which there shall
be no discussion about the senses or their objects—no talk of death
or birth, disease or old age—no questioning about existence (bhuva)
or non-existence, about eternity or non-eternity, in which words
shall be useless, and the idea of the boundless and illimitable (real-
ized), but not talked about.'
" Then he added this Gâtha :
In the beginning there was neither birth or death, or age or
disease,
Neither earth or water, fire, wind, or space,
Then there was no need of a Teacher for the three worlds,
But a condition of perfect freedom, lasting, pure, and self-con-
tained.'
1)
Possibly one element in Buddha's objection to
an Iswara, as expressed in this passage, may be
only the aversion to the received Christian doc-
trine of the creation of all things out of nothing, so
commonly heard in the mouth of the masters of phy-
sical science and other thinking men of the present
generation; and this, of course, will still leave room
for Buddha being an orthodox Pantheist, accord-
ing to the common conception of Indian theology.
But the passage, unfortunately, affords evidence
of a general dislike in Buddha's mind to all theolo-
gical speculation.
" As a man who participates
in the great mass of evil which exists," says he,
“I seek only a physician to give me health :
that is, I am a practical man, my mission is to
144 The Natural History of Atheism.
preach redemption from the course of sin, by the
practice of virtue; and I do not see that curious
speculation about the creation of the world can
help me in my work. Nay, rather I do see that
many learned Brahmins occupy themselves with
speculations about Trimurti and other theological
formulas, while the world around them is lying in
sin and wretchedness. This is somewhat like the
tone of our own John Stuart Mill, and men of his
school; and no doubt is amongst the most plausi-
ble and pardonable. forms that the absurdity of
atheism or agnosticism can assume.
There are
other points in this same discourse, which plainly
point to an identity of Buddha's negative philoso-
phy with that of the great English Utilitarian.
The existence of evil is a stumbling-block to both.
"If there had been a Creator, all things would
have been good; and there would be no possibility
of evil."
There is no need of answering this ob-
jection formally here; it is manifestly not a whit
better than saying that because a man can imagine
something which he thinks better in the construc-
tion of our existing steam-engines, therefore there
was no James Watt. The existence of evil can no
more prove the non-existence of a supreme author
of good, than the existence of a rainy day can
Buddhism.
145
prove the non-existence of the sun.
Evil is a
mere term of relative inconvenience, and has no
meaning in the harmonious totality of the divinely-
regulated system of the universe. Another of
Buddha's difficulties in thiş passage recalls Mill:
“ If there was an Iswara,” says the son of Sud-
daohana,“ there could be no succession of events."
Strange ; when he is just the eternal centre from
which all successions must necessarily be supposed
to proceed : but observe, this is merely an oriental
statement of the famous doctrine of invariable
sequence, which Mill and his school use as a shib-
boleth to juggle the idea of a great First Cause out
of the world. That all things are connected to-
gether by a necessary law of cause and effect, is
Buddha's fundamental principle of metaphysics.
Whoever, practising the rules of a Brahmana, observes the
world around him (tchu-fă, ye damma),
Sees at once that these things are produced by mutual relation-
ship;
Perceiving that the world around him is produced by this mutual
dependence,
He recognises then that all phenomena are but the result of cause
and effect.”
And in many other passages. Now how is it that
in Buddha's mind, as in the system of J. S. Mill
* This seems to be the well-known stanza, “Ye damma hetu
prabhasa," etc.
> *
7
146 The Natural History of Atheism.
and his school, this notion of invariable sequence
and necessary interdependence should connect it-
self with such an unreasoned absurdity as atheism.
Simply thus :—Every popular theology delights
in ignoring the chain of what we call secondary
causes, and substituting for them the direct action
of a God specially intervening and interfering at
the call of the believer. Whatsoever is done in
the world is done directly by God, at the instance
and for the benefit of me, his worshipper. This
is everywhere the theology of what our theolo-
gians call the natural man; and it is only natural
that such an altogether false and degrading idea
of the Divine procedure should be met by the
scientific assertion of necessary sequence and in-
variable law. But philosophers like Buddha and
Mill, who have the largeness of view to see the
absurdity of subjecting the scheme of Divine action
in a vast and various universe to the momentary
conveniences of a petty individual, should also not
fail to observe that an invariable sequence, and a
.constant dependence, is inconceivable without a
persistent inherent or underlying Something which,
by its unifying action, makes variability invariable,
and dependence not accidental !
We thus see how Gotama, whether from having
Buddhism.
147
been brought up under the influence of a sceptical
school of metaphysics—and India has always been
fertile in all schools of metaphysics—or from the
idiosyncrasy of his own mind, while starting as a
religious reformer, had the strange misfortune of
being forced to throw behind his back the great
lever-power and key-stone of all religion, the idea
of GOD. Had he then nothing but simple morality
to preach ? Was he an Asiatic Zeno, or Epicte-
tus, and nothing more? Could he conquer the
world by cold, stoical morality, and sublime asceti-
cism alone? No. He required something more;
and he found it in that wide-spread oriental doc-
trine, to which we have already adverted, THE
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. This doctrine, in
the mind of the general English reader, is a mere
Pythagorean fancy, of which traces are found also
among the Jews, at the time of our Lord (John ix.
2); but, in order to comprehend Buddhism, we
must seize upon this fancy as a living fact in the
popular religions of the East; as part of the very
atmosphere of all religious life, and the substratum
of all oriental theology. The slightest acquaint-
ance with the common books of Brahmanic wis-
dom - such as the Hitopadesa - will show how
deeply this notion lies at the very roots of the
148 The Natural History of Atheism.
whole moral life of the Hindoos. It was a doc-
trine, like the virtue of ascetism, which Buddha
did not invent, but accepted simply as he found it.
Logical proof of such a doctrine there was none;
but it served admirably so far to explain the exist-
ence of moral evil in the world, and was at the
same time a striking and constantly present exem-
plification of Gotama's metaphysical doctrine of
necessary sequence, or invariable law, which, as
we have seen in his system, has usurped the func-
tions of the Divine Reason and the Divine volition.
And it will readily be confessed, that in the ab-
sence of a habitual reference to the Divine will in
the exercise of that living faith which St. Paul so
philosophically defines in the Hebrews (xi. 1.)
there is no moral lever that a religious teacher
could wield with more effect than this doctrine of
metempsychosis. For see how it works. The
life of man on this earth is not an isolated phenom-
enon; it is the sequence of many lives that have
preceded it, by a necessary chain of moral causa-
tion, and the precedent of many lives that by the
continuation of the same chain of cosmic interde-
pendence shall follow it. By virtue of this chain
of necessary moral sequence, the evils and the
blessings, or rather the exemption from certain
Buddhism.
149
worse forms of evil in terrestrial life, are to be re-
garded as the retributive consequence of vices or
virtues practised in previous stages of existence;
as in like manner no vice indulged in here can
remain without its propagated seed of misery
in a future state, and no virtue can be prac-
tised without insuring a certain necessary re-
ward, or necessary issue of merit in some future
phasis of transfiguration. The awful power of a
propagated vicious tendency, or inherited curse,
in the case of certain early Greek families, lends
inspiration to some of the most solemn choruses
in the Greek drama; and the experience of every-
day life exhibits the ugly issue from some pa-
ternal sin, marring the features or giving rotten-
ness to the bones of their unfortunate progeny.
A habitual realisation of this fearful power of sin
and misery to propagate themselves through
long generations might prevent many an act of
reckless folly, or habit of degrading vice, even
with reference to the present life; but if, with the
additional horrors of a creeping or a slimy meta-
morphosis, the consequences of to-day's sin are
believed to extend over hundreds and thousands
of ages, not in the person of his progeny, but in
the very transmuted blood and bone of the
150 The Natural History of Atheism.
offender, the moral restraint arising from such a
faith cannot be inconsiderable; nay, rather, will
act precisely as the hope of Heaven and the fear
of hell act upon the minds of professing Christians.
No man would willingly cherish the idea of be-
coming a pig, or an ass, or a snake, or a crocodile,
or a newt, or a toad, or a spider, or a goose, in a
future state ; but the fear of such an embruted re-
appearance of self, stands constantly in the eye of
the pious devotee of Brahma or Buddha, and
works accordingly.
The consummation of metempsychosis, when it
has run through its complete series of the most
favourable changes, is NIRVANA, or eternal beati-
tude in the bosom of the Infinite. To the contem-
plative Hindoo mind the miseries of life present
themselves in the similitude of a continual tossing
on a very stormy sea; and the contrary of this,
which is the supreme object of desire, is a quiet
and breezeless haven of eternal repose. The same
conception of a state of perfect bliss after death
appears in the Christian analogue of an eternal
Sabbath-a Sabbath of rest which, literally taken,
would indeed be an extremely stupid state, even
for the most lazy saints; but which, to active and
energetic natures, such as belong to most well-
Buddhism.
151
constituted Englishmen, would be a state of intol-
erable stagnation and uninterrupted fret. The
Christian Sabbath of rest, accordingly, is to be
understood relatively; it represents a state in
which the human being shall be freed from a suc-
cession of sorrowful struggles, by which his higher
nature on earth is oppressed and strangled ; so
also the Nirvana of the Buddhists. It is merely
the stoical indifference, the philosophical freedom
from vain cares and silly joys, the unclouded seren-
ity of a soul living in perfect harmony with the
constitution of things; this worked up to its
ripe consummation in a future state, and ex-
pressed with all the exaggeration belonging to
the full swing of Oriental imagination, and the
curious subtlety of Hindoo metaphysics. It is, in
fact, our eternal life, and nothing else, as the
following Gathas, or memorial verses, distinctly
declare :-
66. There is one born now amongst men
Who has practised the rules of piety for ages,
The Prince Royal, son of Suddhôdana Raja,
Who has resigned the royal dignity and become a recluse ;
He, desiring to open the gates of everlasting life,
Is now proceeding towards the Bôdhi Tree.
If
you are able to do so, and equal to the task,
Repair straightway and see him there beneath the tree,
For now he is about to cross over to the other side
152 The Natural History of Atheism.
And desires above all things to save others with himself;
Bôdhisatwa, himself enlightened,
Desires also to enlighten others.'"
And again
"Oh ! Brahma Devarâja, attend carefully !
I am willing now to open the gate of immortality.
If any will listen, let them come gladly;
Let them hearken to me as I declare the tidings of this Law.'"
And this other :
I now desire to turn the wheel of the excellent law ;
For this purpose am I going to that city of Benares,
To give light to those enshrouded in darkness,
And to open the gate of Immortality to men.'»
And yet again :-
Then they addressed Buddha as follows-Venerable Gôtama !
your body is of a beautiful appearance, your face and your eyes
round and fresh, and all your senses in perfect accord; you must
indeed have found the elixir of immortality, and the way of life.'
" Then the world-honoured one replied, 'Ye Rishis ! mock not
Tathagata by calling him “the venerable Gôtama." Ye are in-
deed in the way of death, and shall reap sorrow and disappoint-
ment by continuing therein ; but I have found the way of Immor-
tality, and am now abiding in it. I am able to instruct you
therein, if you will but attend and consider my words, if
but walk according to my directions; if a man or woman will
leave the world, and follow me, desiring to find that highest con-
dition of a true Brahmana, to reach the fountain-head of such a
condition, then such an one shall surely find it, and arrive at the
desired goal; his faculties perfected, he shall cut himself off from
you will
Buddhism.
153
further birth and death ; and well-founded in his religious life
he shall hereafter receive no other form of temporary existence
(bhava). This is what ye should meditate on.' And so the Gâtha
says-
««• Those five Rishis mockingly spoke of Buddha as Gôtama,
The world-honoured one in pity taught them, saying,
“Let not your thoughts be so proud and high;
Let go that pride of self, and obey and reverence me,
There is no pride of self in me, but perfect self-composure ;
I desire to change in you the ground of your destiny,
I, who have become Buddha, honoured by the world,
For the sake of all living things, I would bring this good.'
We have given these passages at length that
the reader may perceive how far from true their
assertion is who tell us that the Buddhist finds his
highest bliss in the prospect of ANNIHILATION.
People ought to have thought ten times before
they allowed themselves to father on the founder
of a great popular religion any such absurdity.
Had Buddha really, like the ancient Hebrews,
meant to ignore a future life in the enunciation of
his law, he would simply have said nothing about
it; but he never would have come forward, in-
ducing men to become his disciples by proclaim-
ing-
“O sin-laden creatures, and miserable mortals, attend carefully,
I, Buddha, am now revealed ready to open the gates of ANNIHI-
LATION to all Aesh!"
7*
154 The Natural History of Atheism.
What he taught was the annihilation of our
wretched limited existence here, like the existence
of a poor prisoned eagle in a small cage, as the
necessary condition of a participation in the un-
hampered life of beatified spirits, knowing not the
bonds of flesh and blood, nor the fretful distrac-
tions of petty terrestrial relations. In interpreting
the Nirvana as every other dogma of oriental
theology, we must put our sober occidental imagi-
nation into training, and bear in mind constantly
that the whole phraseology in which their dogmas
are expressed is systematic exaggeration and para-
dox. Perfectly true, no doubt it is, that when
Buddha, in a state of transcendental ecstasy, talks
of the "absence of all relationship, the destruction
of personality, the non-consciousness of an Ego,
and a condition of mind letting go all thoughts of
what exists, and what does not exist," *__such a
description of Nirvana, when analysed by a sober-
minded European metaphysician, seems to mean
absolute blankness and vacuity, or simple annihila-
tion; but what we have to do with, in determin-
ing the doctrines of the Buddhist faith, as practi-
cally received and cherished by the millions of
Asiatic souls, is not the analysis of metaphysical
* Beal, pp. 176, 237, 172, 246, 284
Buddhism.
155
exaggerations, but the popular impression made
by a popular similitude ; for Nirvana, like some
of our Christian doctrines, though now presented
to us as a crystallised dogma, was originally only
a simile, such as could most strikingly impress the
exemption of a state of celestial bliss from the
common woes of terrestrial humanity. And as far
as the practical working of Buddhism is concerned,
and its effect on the minds of the great believing
masses, we must never forget that perfect Nirvana
is a potency of beatitude altogether exceptional,
peculiar to the Buddhas, and the more saintly of
their devotees, and could no more lie within the
calculation of an ordinary worshipper, than any
common pious Roman Catholic can look for a
recognised place in the Calendar along with St.
Francis of Assisi, or a place in Heaven on the
right hand of the Virgin Mary, who was indeed
once only a devout mother in Israel, but is now
worshipped by more than one-half of Christen-
dom as the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of
God.
So far we have attempted to draw in rapid sketch
the main lines of the Buddhistic piety as professed
and practised by the great Buddha himself. We
now proceed to what for our present purpose is a
156 The Natural History of Atheism.
much more important question ; but a question
which happily requires very few words for its defin-
ite answer. What is Buddhism in the faith of
those who now profess the religion-the millions
of pious orthodox devotees in Ceylon, China,
Thibet, Burmah, and elsewhere? The question
we have to answer now is not what Buddha was,
according to the best historical results which a
careful analysis of the traditions yields, but under
what conception is he actually worshipped; for it
is from this conception alone that we are entitled
to draw an answer to our inquiry. Do the Bud-
dhists as a sect profess atheism? To reach the
Buddhist point of view in reference to this matter,
we must have recourse again to the great doctrine
of transmigration--or rather, that particular form
of it which we are accustomed to express in the-
ological language by the term INCARNATION. We
stated before that, though by us looked on as a
mere man, to the Hindoo conception Buddha is a
God-man--a Messiah---and therefore justly wor-
shipped, not with merely heroic honours, such as
the Greeks paid to Theseus and Hercules, or the
Romans to Romulus. No Roman ever conceived
of Romulus as existing before his birth on the
Quirinal Hill; but the oriental Buddha appeared
Buddhism.
157
on earth, as the Messiah of a perfect law, only after
æons of supermundane existence spent with Devas,
and other divine personages, in one of the Hindoo
heavens. Nor is Buddha the only being of his
transcendental kind that has been sent, or will be
sent, into this lower world. There are many
Buddhas : in the infinity of ages, innumerable;
and the orthodox Ceylonese belief with regard to
Buddhas may be stated formally thus :-In order
to redeem mankind from the slavery of sense, and
the misery of sin, from time to time a perfect
Being in the form of a man is sent into the world
to serve as an example and guide to all who are
striving to lessen the evils of existence, and possi-
bly, in the long end, to attain supreme beatitude.
These are called Buddhas: they are thoroughly
enlightened in reference to all matters of Divine
law; and in consideration of this, deserve supreme
honour and reverence from men. They derive
their inspiration from themselves; their insight in
all spiritual matters is intuitive, and their utterance
oracular. Of these Buddhas, for the present kalpa,
or age of the world, Gotama Buddha, or Sakya
Muni, is the supreme; and if there be any Being
in heaven or earth before whom all human beings
ought to bow down with unreserved submission,
158 The Natural History of Atheism.
as at once the true expounder of the Divine law,
and its radiant manifestation, it is Gotama Buddha.
Absolutely certain, indeed, it cannot be said to be
that this great religious reformer formally institu-
ted the worship of himself: but there is no record
of his having set before his disciples any higher
object of adoration; and it is in every view, ac-
cording to Buddhist theology, to be regarded as
the highest possible satisfaction to the religious in-
stincts of human nature, that the figure of the
supreme Buddha sits enthroned as the supreme
object of worship in all Buddhistic temples. Ac-
cording to this doctrine, the religion of the Buddh-
ists cannot in any sense be charged with the ab-
surdities of atheism. The peculiarity of their piety
consists simply in the concentration of the feeling
of reverence on the transcendental personality of a
Divine proclaimer of the eternal moral law; God,
as the creator and director of the physical universe,
being left entirely out of view. And, though this
system is undoubtedly both narrow and inade-
quate, it has at least the merit of directing the
faculty of reverence to an object at once the most
worthy and the most practical; and, in this view,
there can be little doubt that Plato, who found
cause to protest so strongly against the immoral-
Buddhism.
159
ity of the Homeric gods, as of most evil example
to their mortal worshippers, would have allowed
Buddha to pass without censure, perhaps even with
a kindly nod of approbation. Neither can the
Buddhists justly be charged with the humiliation
which arises from the deification of mortal men,
such as the Romans practised when they placed
Cæsar and Augustus amongst the gods. Not only
was Buddha an eminently moral man, and there-
fore more worthy of worship than the immoral
gods of the Greeks; but he was, as we have said
repeatedly, a god and above all gods, as the Gatha
has it-
"Above, below, and through the Earth,
Amongst all creatures that have life,
Whether gods or men, Buddha is chief.'"*
So much for the practical atheism of which the
Buddhists have been generally accused. The wor-
shippers of a transcendental Messiah, the promul-.
gator of the eternal law of moral rectitude, never
can be classed with the deniers of God; they only
refuse to complicate practical religion with the
metaphysical question as to the origin of the uni-
* Beal, p. 365; and at p. 71 he is represented as omniscient, and
seeing through all things in a moment.
160 The Natural History of Atheism.
verse; from which, by the way, the Greeks also
abstained, and were never accused of anything but
an anthropomorphic superstition. But not even in
speculation is it necessary for a Buddhist to deny
absolutely the doctrine of an Ishwara, or supreme
Creator. Whatever difficulties Buddha himself
might have had on this subject, and however
averse he was to mix up theological speculations
with the obligations of the moral law, the follow-
ing exceedingly curious statement from a speech
made by a Buddhist priest, in the celebrated pub-
lic debate on Buddhism held at Pantura, in Ceylon,
will amply demonstrate that his priests do not con-
sider themselves as floating about amid the reason-
less vacuities of a blind atheism :
“ He (the priest) did not deny a Creator, but admitted that he
owned his existence to one; but why should he be allowed to be-
come the enemy of the Creator? which he was now. If any one
deserved God's conversion it was he. The Christian theory of a
Creator was false, and he will presently explain to them who the
true Creator was on whom he believed, and what he says will be
borne out even by the Scripture account of the creation. He must
say that this part of the Bible was most prudently written by one
who was in no way a fool. It was said there that the Spirit of
God moved on the face of the waters; and why should this fact
have been mentioned, if not to show that the acting of this Spirit
on the water was the cause of all animal and vegetable life. This
* A full account of the Buddhist controversy, held at Pantura,
August, 1873. Ceylon Times Office, Colombo, 1873.
Buddhism.
16
was certainly so. The action of air on water always produced
animal life; if a cocoanut, which usually remains on the tree with-
out rotting for nine or ten months, be pierced through, and air
be allowed to enter into it, the water inside was sure to breed
worms; and so long as air could be excluded from water, there was
no generation of any insect. Likewise in this instance, the Spirit
of God, as it was called, acted upon the face of the waters, and it
produced animal life. The origin of all species was then, even
according to the Bible, air, with which was associated heat and
water. These three, heat, air, and water, by whatever name
known—whether as Brahma, Vishnu, and Iswara, or God, Son,
and Holy Ghost-were the identical and only origin of species.
These were their only Creator, and him he would worship; and as
neither air, nor water, nor heat could produce any beings without
the aid of the other, but were co-existent and so closely associated
with each other that they could not be said to have separate exist-
ences, the Christians were justified in saying that though there are
three beings, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, yet they were not
three Gods, but one God. These, however, were not beings, but
states."
This is Pantheism—the Pantheism of Heraclitus,
Anaximenes, and some of the other pre-Socratic
thinkers of Asiatic Greece ; certainly not Atheism.
The above outlines, given as much as possible
in the words of the original documents, will, it is
hoped, enable the intelligent reader, brought up
in a European atmosphere, to understand some-
thing of the proper attitude and aspect of Buddh-
ism, as one of the most notable phenomena in the
moral history of mankind. It remains only,
for the sake of greater clearness and decision,
162 The Natural History of Atheism.
that we give a short summation of the results of
our inquiry as to the worth and worthlessness
of this phenomenon. And first of its worthless-
ness,
Buddhism, after making every allowance for its
many points of practical excellence, and of happy
adaptation to the genius of the East, can in no
wise be looked upon as anything but an abnormal
manifestation of the religious life of man, being,
as it is, built up on the foundation of the following
five essentially false propositions :-
(1.) The proposition that human existence on
this earth is an evil. This proposition could only
be true if God were a devil, and if the general
arrangements of the system of life in the universe
were such as showed a manifest purpose to produce,
and did actually produce, a preponderance of mis-
ery ; but this is exactly the reverse of the fact.
If there are headaches in the world, every head is
not always aching ; if there are toothaches, every
tooth in every head is not always longing to offer
itself to the expert wrench of the dentist; if there
are rainy seasons all over the world, and whole
months of rain in Skye, rain is not the constant
product of the atmosphere, as the clouds do not
always blind the brightness of the firmament, even
Buddhism.
163
in Skye; if lovers sometimes shoot themselves from
passion, and husbands sometimes murder their
wives from satiety, all men are not always lovers,
all lovers do not shoot themselves, and all husbands
do not murder their wives, or even weary of their
society. Neither Romeo and Juliet, nor Richard
III., nor Hamlet, nor Othello, nor the Pelopidan
and Labdacidan enormities of the Greek drama,
are tragedies that occur every day ; rather it is
their extreme rarity that fits them specially for
popular excitement and stage effect. Larks are
shot sometimes by idle boys, or comprehensive
providers of dainty suppers for ancient Roman
emperors or modern French gourmands : but the
shooting is a moment of misery to the lark, while
its singing has been continued through long sum-
mers of bright breezy sunshine. Existence, taken
as a whole, is as preferable to non-existence as
light is to darkness, or a glass of cool water or
warm port wine to an empty tumbler. To say
that existence is an evil, is to spit in the sun's
face, because some persons have cataract; or
to say that there is no sun, because you happen
to live under the shadow of an eclipse. Exist-
ence is not a bane, but a blessing ; not a
row, but a joy; and he lives most wisely and
sor-
164 The Natural History of Atheism.
most religiously who knows how to enjoy it,
according to its nature, most intensely and most
largely.
(2.) The second fundamental error of Buddha
consists in his placing human excellence in medi-
tation rather than in action. The hero with him is
always a saint, never a king. This is a subordi-
nation contrary to the great fact of the universe,
and in no wise to be accepted. The world is a
work; life is a work; growth is a work; all things
are full of labour, and attain to their perfection only
by labour. True it is, no doubt, in the order of
abstract relationship, thought is the father of speech,
and speech is the harbinger of deed; but this ab-
stract fatherhood of thought is a thing in itself
absolutely without reality ; the mere thought of an
orange, though entertained and cherished in the
most capacious of fertile brains for infinite ages,
will never produce an orange : abstract thought is
essentially unproductive. Hence it is that mere
thinking in the most highly gifted of human beings
never produced anything, except in so far as the
using of given materials, according to the dictation
of thought, may be called production ; but God is
essentially productive, or what we call creative,
and with him any manifestation of living energy is
Buddhism.
165
necessarily both thought and deed. *
We cannot,
therefore, in aspiring to a divine life, overlook the
dignity of the deed, to make an idol of thought.
A German professor may do this, with a portentous
ambition, amid fumes of tobacco and stale beer,
constructing the universe by the stages of a logical
process; but it is all vanity : a living world pro-
ceeds only from a living God; and though a man
may found a metaphysical system, he never can
preach an effective practical gospel on such a basis.
Religious meditation, when set up as an end, not
as an exercise towards an end, can issue only with
all the more highly gifted minds in transcendental
reverie, but with the great majority in devout tor-
por and pious monotony.
(3.) In the third place, coming out from his long
session under the Buddhi tree of devout medita-
tion, Buddha, as might have been expected from
such a beginning, falls plump into the vulgarest of
all ethical heresies, viz., that the proper cure for the
abuse of our passions and appetites is not regula-
tion, but total abstinence from the exciting cause,
and violent extirpation of the appetite. Here our
oriental saint goes directly to war with Nature,
* This is what Goethe meant when he put into the mouth of
Faust, in a well-known passage, "IM ANFANG WAR DIE THAT."
166 The Natural History of Atheism.
and has just as much chance of succeeding as in
attempting to live without his dinner, or making a
railway to the sun. Nevertheless, this device of
total abstinence is a very old blunder, and fre-
quently practised, from the apparent directness and
certainty of the remedy. Cut off the supply at the
fountain-head, and the waters will not overflow in
the valley. Certainly. But if all the supply of all
the fountain-heads be imperiously cut off, what
becomes of your valleys then, and of all the green
vegetation there? “ If thy right eye offend thee,
pluck it out; and if thy right hand offend thee,
cut it off :" an evangelic text this of the highest
value, and the best of all rules for a special case ;
a case in which extreme diseases cry out for extreme
remedies, but .which never can afford rational
ground for the statement of a general rule. Sane-
minded men will keep their right eyes and their
right hands as long as they possibly can where
they belong. The end of man is not to amputate
and to cripple his functions, but to put them forth
lustily, and to enjoy himself in the luxuriance of
their energy. Morality with all its excellence has
no commission to usurp the place of enjoyment.
God delights to see his creatures flap their wings
in the free expatiation of sweet life. The rule of
Buddhism.
167
right is not the woodman's axe to fell, but the
gardener's knife to prune; it is, to use Plato's well-
known simile, neither the chariot nor the steeds
that draw the chariot, but, only the coachman that
holds the rein and applies the spur or presses down
the drag, as the case may require.
(4.) The Buddhist, and indeed the Brahminists
also, to a certain extent, err in teaching that the
natural and necessary boundary between the self-
existent and all-derived existence can be overleapt
by any amount of human virtue, however fault-
less.
The confusion of the Divine and human spheres
of existence is the origin of much that appears to us
so strange in the religious fictions of the Hindoos.
For the purposes of fiction, Southey, in his “ Curse
of Kehama," might use it wisely; but to sober
thinking it remains a gigantic monstrosity. It
seems natural to pantheism under certain conditions
to fall into this error. Spinoza and Giordano
Bruno, Timogine, kept quite free from it. Hebrew,
Mahommedan, and Christian dualism, of course
steer clear of any such portentous imaginations.
The tendency in them rather is to depress and
discourage the creature by the overwhelming pre-
sence of an omniscient and overpowering Creator.
168 The Natural History of Atheism.
Hence the awful gloom and weighty seriousness
not unfrequently associated with. Christian piety,
especially in its early stages, and with an unkindly
environment.
(5.) The last fundamental error of the Buddhists
consists in the imagination that the human mind,
as essentially reasonable, can ever be satisfied with-
out the faith in a self-existent plastic Reason, as
the living root out of which this wonderful whole
of things, which we call the world, grows; in other
words that the human mind can rest contented with
the conception of an inyariable sequence of things
without a reasonable substantial ground of all
sequence.
It will be observed that this error touches only
the intellectual side of Buddhism as a philosophy,
and does not necessarily vitiate its practical effi-
cacy as a rule of life. At the same time, it must
not be forgotten that man is, as the lawyers say, an
unum quid ; that he has a head as well as heart;
and that indirectly the practical efficiency of any
religion will be seriously affected, when its funda-
mental principles are felt to be at war with the
primary instincts of human thought.
So long,
indeed, as thought is suppressed, and education
neglected, such a religion may continue to satisfy
Buddhism.
169
}
the masses, and dominate the popular sentiment
without serious question ; but the moment a culti-
vated reason is stirred to the exercise of its legiti-
mate functions, such a religion droops. The no-
bility of its moral inspiration is forgotten in the
absurdity of its intellectual assertions, and the
blackness of its intellectual negations ; for a man
will not envy the position of moral saintship in a
system, where to be an orthodox believer implies
that he is intellectually an ass.
In the view of these serious defects, one cannot
but feel considerable difficulty in understanding how
such a system should have succeeded, as a reform
of the existing Brahmanism ; inasmuch as its pe-
culiar doctrines are little more than overstrained
statements and, paradoxical exaggerations of what
already existed in Brahmanism, less the altogether
rational recognition of a creative Mind. Any
person
who will take the trouble to read the open-
ing chapters of the Laws of Manu, translated by
Sir William Jones, cannot fail to perceive how
much more rational and noble the theology of the
Brahmans is than the soulless talk of Buddha about
invariable sequence, and unavoidable effects from
unexplained causes. We can therefore attribute
the extraordinary moral conquests of the Buddhis-
8
170 The Natural History of Atheism.
tic doctrine, not so much to its own intrinsic
superiority as to its emphatic practical protest
against the selfishness of sacerdotal caste, the
Pharisaic and ceremonial element, with the extreme
penances, mortifications, and sacrificial atone-
ments * thereto belonging, as also fire-worship,
and other forms of idolatrous superstition, all of
which in Buddha's time had assumed such mon-
strous proportions as to rouse the moral indigna-
tion of society, pretty much in the same way that
the public market of indulgences by the Roman
popes in the early part of the sixteenth century had
prepared the popular mind for the anti-sacerdotal
protests of Martin Luther.
In reference to sacerdotal penances and ascetic
mortifications of the flesh, it is of importance to
observe that, though in the above biographical
sketch the characteristic features of asceticism and
self-imposed mendicancy seems sufficiently pro-
nounced, there exists, nevertheless, a broad dis-
tinction between a system of artificial abstinence
and a system of unnatural self-torture; and in op-
posing himself to such unnatural practices in all
* The Chinese book contains repeated strong protests against
the shedding of blood by sacrificial atonement. See particularly
p. 159.
Buddhism.
171
forms, Sakya Muni, considering his precedents,
and the atmosphere which he breathed, is certain-
ly entitled to a very considerable amount of praise.
Bitten as he was from the very moment of his con-
version with that rage of plunging into the con-
trary, which is the natural impulse of all sudden
converts, it cannot be doubted that he went per-
sonally through a regular tourse of that curri-
culum of sacred self-torture which was lauded by
the then doctors of the Brahmanic church; but
herein, as our modern evangelical devotees in the
works of the law, he found no rest to his soul;
and hence was led, in the process of devout
meditation, to strike out that more moderate form
of self-discipline, which, to his high-strained im-
agination, and set against the orthodox cycle of
Hindoo mortifications, might well commend it-
self as the true via media between carnal enjoy-
ment and religious castigation. In order to real-
ise this with all vividness, we shall set down here
a curious passage which recites how, in the outset
of his religious career, the Bôdhi satwa, or Buddhi
designatus, in the solitudes of the forest, came
upon a company of Rishis,* who were practis-
*
* In Williams's Sanscrit Dictionary a Rishi is defined seer and
saint.
172 The Natural History of Atheism.
ing their prescribed austerities, and learnt from
them the various phases of self-mortification, as
follows:
66. Venerable brother !' they replied, "you may ask any questions
you please respecting our religious discipline, and we, as far as
possible, will explain everything to you in detail. Amongst us
there are some who mortify themselves by eating nothing except
edible herbs (tsae), or spouting shoots of plants (t’he), or the
tender stems of the Nyagrodha tree, or of the Duküla (?) tree, or
of the Kanikala tree; whilst others eat nothing but the stems of one
particular tree (ekadruma), others eat the excrements of the ox,
others nothing but the roots of certain plants, or the mashed fibres
of different shrubs; again there are others who take just water
enough to preserve life, etc.; some clothe themselves with
hempen vesture; others with the fleece of the black sheep; others
with grassy robes; others with the cotton of the wild caterpillar;
others with the dragon-beard plant ; others with deer-skins; others
with the rags of corpses, or with filthy rags; some again sleep on
boards, some on chips, some on tree-trunks, some on pestle-ham-
mers; some again dwell in cemeteries; others in holes; others
under the open heavens; others stand in water; others use fire
to their inconvenience; others turn always to the sun ; others
raise both arms above their heads and keep them so ; others sit in
one fixed posture on the earth; others cleanse not their bodies
from filth; others have their hair spirally-twisted; others pull
out the hair of their heads; others pull out the hair on their faces;
thus it is these different Rishis practise self-mortification, whilst in
turn they give themselves to profound meditation and ardent
prayers, and vows to be born in Heaven, or to be born again
amongst men.”
In opposition to such monstrous distortions and
grim caricatures of rational self-control, Buddha
was entitled to plant himself as a sort of monkish
Buddhism.
173
Aristotle, placing sanctity in the mean betwixt two
extremes; and this, in fact, is what we find him
doing in the following remarkable passage:
66. Ye Bhikshus ! who have left your homes, there are two things
ye should finally and forever renounce-all worldly sources of pleas-
ure and bodily gratification, and also excessive mortification of
body, which neither tend to self-profit nor the profit of others !'
And so the Gâtha says-
66. Reject and forsake places and modes of excessive penance;
Check and entirely control sensuous gratification;
If a man is able to follow these two lines of conduct
Immediately he will attain the true way of ETERNAL LIFE.'
" Then the Buddha continued his address— Bhikshus! be assured
that I have given up each of these erroneous methods, and this is
the middle path to which I have attained ; thus am I enlightened,
thus my eyes are able to see and my mind to know, and therefore I
have gained a condition of rest (santi), and am in possession of
complete spiritual life, and have accomplished the acquirement of
perfect intelligence, and am now a true Shaman, and have reached
Nirvana and am perfected. If then, Bhikshus, ye wish to reach
this condition, ye must also use this middle path which I have used,
and your eyes shall be opened, and wisdom shall spring up within,
and you shall enjoy rest, and reach Nirvana, and the eight paths
of holiness (As'htanga Marga), viz. -Samyak-drishti, Samyak-sam-
kalpa, Samyagvâk, Samyagadjiva, Samyak-karmanta, Samyagvy-
âyâma, Samyak-smriti, Samyak-samrâdhi. This, Bhikshus ! is the
middle path, which having attained to, my eyes are opened, and I
have found rest, etc. To this, therefore, ye ought to tend; as the
Gâtha says-
66. Because of these eight paths leading aright,
A man casts off the trammels of life, death, and fear,
Having entirely got rid of all the effects of Karma,
Through eternity he shall no more receive migratory existence.'”
174 The Natural History of Atheism.
In preaching thus, the Hindoo reformer could
not but appear as the spiritual friend and deliverer
of many pious souls, who, to use the language of
the apostles of Christianity, had for ages been
groaning under a yoke which neither they nor
their fathers had been able to bear; and we may
with perfect truth recognise in him a certain spirit-
ual brotherhood with the great Western preacher
who taught that in Christ Jesus there is neither
circumcision nor uncircumcision, but a new crea-
ture.
(2.) But the principal element which in the end
secured to Buddha such a. remarkable triumph
over the established religion of his country, be.
yond all doubt was the extreme innocency, purity,
benevolence, and disinterested philanthropy of
himself and his immediate disciples. It was the
fervour of the missionary spirit that conquered in
the case of Buddha, as it has so often done in the
case of Christian missionaries. In all times and
in all places love is the key to the human heart,
and the great weapon in all moral battles; in all
high-minded, self-devoting apostleship, there is a
contagion which, when aptly applied, the human
heart can no more resist than gunpowder can dis-
own the spark which ignites it. The admiration
Buddhism.
175
produced by the noble and altogether unworldly
self-renunciation of the young Sakyan prince
comes out in several passages of the Chinese book,
and notably in the following:
“Then another Brahman of the company, having observed the
grace and force of Bôdhisatwa's manner, addressed one standing by
and said, “Venerable one ! it seems to me that this is no other than
a child of Heavenly birth, thoroughly acquainted with the human
heart, who now by means of this expedient desires to accomplish
some illustrious purpose. For why? we find that in the world
men speak thus-“I must nourish and bring up my sons in order
that when they grow up they may help to establish and benefit my
family name, in buying and selling and getting profit for me, so that
when I am old I may be able to devote myself to religious inquiries
and practices.” It is thus men generally think and speak, they
have a reference in all they do to their own advantage. But with
this one it is not so, he seeks the good of others and not his own, he
provides nothing for himself.'"
And again :
“ Then one of the Manava youths, a disciple of Alara, broke out
into the following eulogy, his hands clasped together in token of
reverence, as he addressed Bôdhisatwa, 'Oh! rarely seen is such
wisdom as thine; in olden times indeed many kings, satiated with
worldly pleasures, have forsaken their homes, and sought for reli-
gious perfection in the solitudes; but thou ! so young and in the vigor
of your age, to give up the certain enjoyment of Royalty, and to pre-
fer the harshness of a life in the desert-the companion of wild
beasts, and the unfettered birds ! wonderful indeed is this !' And
now, Alara, addressing Bôdhisatwa, said, “Venerable Sir! seeking
what way and in pursuit of what object, have you bent your steps
hither ?11
176 The Natural History of Atheism.
All this, and the general tone and scope of Bud-
dha's teaching, stripped of the grotesque bedizen-
ment in which it is presented, plainly shows that
Buddhism triumphed, just as Christianity tri-
umphed, fundamentally because in all moral bat-
tles, love and humanity, with their innate expan-
siveness, will always triumph over the narrow-
ness of self-contained pride and unsocial ag-
grandisement. If there be in the realm of physi-
cal forces a natural selection, which, as Darwin
teaches, necessarily leads the stronger and more
healthy type to overwhelm the feeble and the dis-
eased, not less certainly is there in the moral world
a law of moral selection, which forces lies to re-
treat before truth, as night yields to the day, and
Malignity to grind her teeth and to spit her venom
before Benignity in vain.*
How far the Buddhistic religion, notwithstand-
ing the high and evangelical tone of its morality,
may have proved a great practical failure, I do not
feel in a condition absolutely to declare. Every
religion that starts with a high and unworldly
Even a zealous Christian missionary allows that Buddhism in
the East has proved "more of a blessing than a curse," and is to
be regarded historically as a notable engine of social elevation.
Three lectures on Buddhism by the. Rev. Ernest T. Eitel. London,
1871, p. 10.
Buddhism.
177
ideal, must in one sense prove a failure as soon as
it becomes a fashion and tradition to profess it.
Christianity, in this sense, has proved a tremen-
dous failure ; and Buddhism, of course, could
much less escape a similar doom, in proportion as
it was less human in its sympathies, and more
removed from common life in its practices. For
Buddhism must fail, not merely like Christianity
in so many places, by outstriding the moral
ambition and transcending the moral capacity of
its professors, but by insanely attempting to over-
ride the common instincts of humanity, and dis-
own the primary conditions on which human
creatures are created. The necessary result of
such an overstrained system is a double morality,
a morality of artificial sanctitude combined with
natural stupidity, and sometimes systematic hy-
pocrisy in the priests and a morality of worldly
accommodation, external observances, and cus-
tomary indulgences in the people, combined with
the silly ceremonial or barren formalism of a
religion which is not a reasonable service. It
might have been expected, indeed, that Buddha,
in protesting against the exclusiveness of caste,
and, like Christ, preaching the gospel to the
poor, might have prevailed to deliver his followers
8*
178 The Natural History of Atheism.
from the burden of supporting a number of idle
persons performing a routine of silly mummeries,
called priests; but religious teachers must exist;
and, whether formally claiming the privileges of
caste or not, they will not fail to organize them-
selves into a strongly knit association of persons
exercising sacerdotal powers, so long as an artifi-
cial ideal of sanctity is maintained, and the people
are not sufficiently instructed to understand that
true religion is not a separate business admin-
istered by a separate profession, but a common
principle of action inspiring all breasts, and giving
elevation to all forms of social energy,
I subjoin two passages from recent writers,
exhibiting what, no doubt, is the dark side of
practical Buddhism (for the light side we cannot
expect to be very patent to English residents and
foreign missionaries), but which still, I fear, must
be accepted as a true picture, so far as it goes :
“It is specifically urged against the doctrines of Fo, by the Con-
fucians, that they unfit men for the business and duties of life, by
fixing their speculations so entirely on another state of existence as
to lead some fanatics to hang or drown themselves in order to antici-
pate futurity ; nay, two persons have been known to commit suicide
together with the view of becoming man and wife in the next
world. The priests are sometimes accused of employing their
superstitious arts in seducing women ; societies of women, at least,
called Ny-Koo, a species of nun or female devotees, are encouragod
Buddhisin.
179
by them. The tricks occasionally made use of by the priests,
resemble the practices of the fakirs of India. Le Comte tells a story
of a bonze, who went about in a vessel stuck full of nails (some-
thing like that in which the Carthaginians are said to have shut up
Regulus), and pretending that it was a merit to relieve him from
his pain, he sold these nails to the devout at so much per head.
“Their notion of abstraction, or quietism, seems to aim at get-
ting rid of all passions, even of thought itself, and ceasing to be
urged by any human desires : a species of mental annihilation,
Certainly, to judge of its effects on the priests, the practice of Bad-
dhism appears to have a most debasing influence. They have,
nearly all of them, an expression approaching to idiotcy, which is
probably acquired in that dreamy state in which one of their most
famous professors is said to have passed nine years, with his eyes
fixed upon a wall! They say, with reference to their systems of
moral retribution, that what a man receives now is an indication of
his conduct in a former state; and that he may augur his future con-
dition by his behavionr in this life. The merit, however, would
seem to consist as much in inaction as action: in the abstinence
from evil, or the mere self-infliction of pain, rather than in the
practice of good. They make up an account with heaven, and de-
mand the balance in bliss, or pay it by sufferings and penances of
their own, just like the papists of Europe.
The next witness is from an intelligent Scots-
man who resided eleven years in Ceylon :-
During the continuance of the festival, the priests of Buddha
seemed to think it incumbent on them to perambulate the town
with their begging dishes, and to go through the ceremony of re-
ceiving alms. They moved on slowly with their fans before their
faces, occasionally halting to receive whatever food was offered
them, but not asking for it. It appeared to me that this was more
of a temporary penance than a regular practice, although to live
by alms is enjoined by the rules of their order. Their sleek faces
* " The Chinese," by J. F. Davis. London : Knight, 1840, p. 219.
180. The Natural History of Atheism.
and sly looks spoke of better fare procured elsewhere with less
trouble and more certainty than wandering in heavy rain through
Kandy, and waiting for supplies from the more devout portion of
those professing the Buddhist religion." *
Very sad, all this ! but it could not be other-
wise ; for neither in Ceylon nor in Canton, or
elsewhere, do men gather grapes of thorns or figs
of thistles. So long as reverence is not firmly
wedded to reason, religion can never exist without
a certain alloy of nonsense, nor morality become
altogether identified with Nature in a creature
with whom Truth is the one proper law, Love the
one seemly inspiration, and Energy, according to
truth and love, the chief end of his existence.
*" Eleven Years in Ceylon," by Forbes, vol. i. pp. 312 and 301.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ATHEISM OF REACTION.
φάσκοντες είναι σοφοί έμωράνθησαν. .
ST. PAUL.
A
CTION AND REACTION ARE EQUAL AND
CONTRARY : so I was taught many years
ago in the Natural Philosophy class, Marischal
College, Aberdeen; and through a long life have
had constant occasion to note the general correct-
ness and wide applicability of the sentence. It is
the nature of every force, in a world made up of
a rich variety of opposing forces, either to be
stopped in its action altogether-as the advancing
tide by a rocky coast-or to be sent back on its
own traces, as we see in the heavings to and fro of
a great crowd of people, when the over-pressure in
one direction produces a stronger pressure in the
opposite direction, till some sort of comfortable
adjustment be achieved in which the jostled thou-
182 The Natural History of Atheism.
sands may breathe freely. So it is exactly in the
great intellectual and moral movements of society,
which constitute the marked epochs of history.
It is impossible to live the space of a single gener-
ation in the world without seeing striking in-
stances of this sort of propulsion and revulsion of
sentiment pass before our eyes. What has be-
come now, for instance, of that grand burst of
classical enthusiasm which, some half-a-century
ago, sent Lord Byron and some score of adventur-
ous Britons on the romantic expedition of driving
the Turk out of Greece, and reconstituting a king-
dom of Greek-speaking men, beneath the white
majesty of the Periclean Parthenon? The Greek
is now, in John Bull's estimate, only a merchant
of very sharp practice, and nothing more. Our
old ally, the Turk, has suffered under a similar
swing of the pendulum ; and the Russophoby of
some thirty or forty years ago is now veering
round to the Russophile point of the political
compass, and accustoming itself to look with a
grand cosmopolitan sympathy even on the proba-
bility of a speedy settlement of the great Arctic
bear on the tip of the Golden Horn. Take, again,
the department of Art. Look into any of the
great English cathedrals, and say what you see
The Atheism of Reaction.
183
there. The internal walls of an edifice of an es-
sentially Gothic type stuck over all round with
monuments and other decorations, in the pure
Greek, or composite Italo-Roman style, as unlike
to what one should expect there, as a tree would
be which, growing up so high on the type of a
white-stemmed birch, flinging its tresses lightly on
the breeze, should suddenly alter its style, and
end in the ruddy arms and dark-green needles of
a Scottish pine. What was the cause of this ?
Simply the reaction from the Gothic style of the
Middle Ages, and the rage of admiration which
possessed Europe for everything that could boast
the prestige of Greek and Roman kinship. In the
architectural books of those days, you will find
the Gothic style of church, college, or cottage, on
which we now pride ourselves, simply noted as a
barbarism, which a cultivated taste will look at to
avoid. And a similar phenomenon may be ob-
served in every form of physical, moral, and in-
tellectual life; so that we may almost lay it down
as a historical proposition of universal validity :
every social state sooner or later begets its contra-
ry; and that not only by the natural power of
recoil which we see in springs and other elastic
bodies, but from the mere love of novelty. In
184 The Natural History of Atheism.
poetry this is particularly remarkable. When
Pope's poetry of sparkling antithesis, sonorous
swell, and shrewd condensation had enjoyed its
day, no genius, however powerful, could have im-
pressed the.British public in a similar degree, had
it presented itself in the same form. A quite new
form of conceiving and picturing the grand old
truths of Nature was required; and this the public,
after a short season of ebb, received in large flood
from Cowper and Burns, Wordsworth and Shel-
ley, Byron, Scott, and others. An influence which
acts so potently and spreads so widely in the
domains of politics, poetry, and the arts, could
not fail to show itself in theology. If our maxim
be true that all action has a tendency to go into
the extreme, and that every social state sooner or
later begets its contrary, then in the movement of
public opinion, and the revolutions of social senti-
ment, it may sometimes happen that religion be-
gets irreligion, and orthodoxy becomes the father
of heterodoxy—a paradoxical thing, no doubt, to
say, but nevertheless quite true, 'when rightly
understood. And to understand it rightly we
must remember the great Aristotelian maxim, that
any good misapplied, or applied without limita-
tion is an evil; and that the great movements of
The Atheism of Reaction.
185
human society called reforms, revolutions, and
revivals, take place generally after the fashion of
floods in water, or strong pressure in a crowd,
which in the nature of the case tend to excess, and
cry for limitation. This is what Solomon meant
when he said :-“Be not righteous overmuch :
why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not wise
overmuch : why shouldst thou die before thy
time ?” When we say, therefore, irreligion is
ofttimes begotten from religion by a natural re-
action, we simply mean that piety exhibited to
the world in a graceless, clumsy, and unpleasing
aspect, or with an obtrusive forwardness, or a
feverish impatience, or with a dictatorial imperi-
ousness, a stern harshness, or in any other form
destitute of the proprieties and the pleasantness of
well-conditioned nature, will have itself to blame
if an effect is produced the very contrary to that
desired. Shut the door with a bang and it opens,
and perhaps strikes you on the face.
think that strange ? No. Then as little be sur-
prised if certain stiff, and rigid, and bristling forms
of theological orthodoxy should produce hetero-
doxy; nay that even theism, the only reasonable
theory of the universe, in the blundering fashion
in which you state it may possibly produce
Do you
186 The Natural History of Atheism.
atheism, the most unreasonable of all theories.
Every exaggerated statement, or offensively-word-
ed proposition--even when there is fundamental
truth in the matter—cannot escape from a double
evil consequence; it not only irritates the person
whom it was meant to convince, but it supplies
him with an argument of which he will not fail to
make a dexterous use. And in this way, every
abuse in religion, and every crude conception and
rash assertion in theology, has a natural tendency
to produce irreligion, and to end, where other
influences co-operate, in practical or speculative
atheism. It will be the business of this paper to
look at this special phase of atheism, somewhat in
detail.
Let us take a glance, in the first place, at the
greatest event in the moral history of modern
Europe — the Reformation, or Revolution, as it
should rather have been called, of the Christian
Church in the sixteenth century. This terrible
ecclesiastical earthquake - for so we may quite
soberly call it -- was unquestionably a reaction
from the excess of sacerdotal assertiveness, and the
abuse of ecclesiastical power, in the latter centuries
of the Middle Ages. How did this excess show
itself? and in what shape did it give sharp offence
The Atheism of Reaction.
187
to the delicate conscience of Martin Luther, and
rouse his sleeping wrath into a thunderstorm of
holy indignation ? Plainly by his parading the
public places, and marching through the highways
of Christendom with a sacerdotal gospel of salva-
tion by works : and what sort of works? Of
course, conventional and arbitrary works, penances
and payments of various kinds imposed by author-
ity of the all-powerful clergy, and having little or
nothing in common with the morality of a pure
life, and a noble character, which is the character-
istic glory of the gospel of Christ, as contrasted
with the great mass of polytheistic religions, the
strange growths of sensuous excitement and trans-
cendental imagination. Against this abuse Luther
protested exactly in the same way, and with simi-
lar effect, as St. Paul protested against the ritual-
ism, ceremonialism, and externalism of various
kinds, on which the Jews raised a meritorious
claim of preference before the general Father of the
human race. Of meritorious preferential claims,
especially when founded on works of a conven-
tional, arbitrary, and institutional character, there
can be no mention before God: " the just live by
faith "_faith in that Saviour who preached a per-
fect ideal of morality, existing always as a measure
188 The Natural History of Atheism.
of attainment, but never as a claim of merit. This
great doctrine, preached by St. Paul and Luther,
and stated with most effective emphasis in the
Epistle to the Romans and the Galatians, has
saved the world twice once from the cumbrous
and narrow-minded ceremonialism of the Jews,
and again from the despotic and soul-stupefying
sacerdotalism of the Romanists. So far well. But
the miner's son of Eisleben was a man of too vol-
canic a temper to be able to keep the reaction
which he roused within the bounds of salutary
moral therapeutics. The sacerdotal ossification
into which he had cast the blood of a new life,
found itself confronted with a fever of individualism
in various violent and grotesque manifestations, re-
moved not less from the imperious dogmatism of
the Roman popes than from the moderation, hu-
manity, and sound-mindedness which characterised
the gospel of St. Paul : and anarchy and confu-
sion, with the braying of a theological ass here,
the cackling of a clerical goose there, and the rav-
ings of a sectarian madman in a third quarter,
began to show face to such a degree that sensible
and quietly-disposed men, like Erasmus, became
seriously alarmed before the spirits they had con-
jured up, and retreated, with a devout timidity,
The Atheism of Reaction.
189
into the sacred ark of the old Catholic Church.
But even with all these extravagances, the simple
doctrine of Luther, that the just shall live by faith,
was exactly, as in the time of St. Paul, forthwith
subjected to a misunderstanding, which even now
works perniciously in some Protestant churches,
and breeds, in a certain class of minds, a distaste
for Christianity which may naturally fall into gen.
eral irreligion, and even rush blindly into the blank
vacuities of atheism. This abuse consists simply
in planting faith antagonistically, not to ceremo-
nial, conventional, and statutory work, or to work
set up as a meritorious human claim, but to vir-
tuous works generally; a perversity sufficiently
evident to any one who will seriously study the
eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
where faith is defined as a practical conviction of
the reality of God's moral government, and a
conviction manifesting itself naturally and necessa-
rily in a course of virtuous, self-sacrificing, and
heroic conduct, such as we see in the lives of all
the great statesmen, patriots, and prophets which
the common consent of mankind has set up for
models of imitation in the great Pantheon of hu-
manity. Thus Christian faith and works are not
opposed, but are essentially one; or, at least, two,
190 The Natural History of Atheism.
of which the one as necessarily produces the other,
as the fruit of a flower is developed out of the
blossom. How far this misapplication or one-
sided statement of the great Protestant doctrine
of salvation by faith has worked in producing,
in the way of reaction, a prejudice against Evan-
gelical preaching altogether, those whose ears
are open to what is felt and said by some of the
most serious thinkers in the midst of us, will have
no difficulty in perceiving. Persons who reject
Christianity, or, like Mr. Atkinson and Miss Mar-
tineau, openly profess a sort of atheism or agnosti-
cism, do it not unfrequently on the ground that
Christianity has failed in its mission; it has not
converted the world, *—and no wonder ; for a re-
ligion that preaches salvation by faith and not by
works, naturally directs attention into a transcen-
dental region of what has been called “other-
worldliness," and far away from all those practical
plans for the improvement of the world and the
progress of society which fall under the profane
category of good works. Of course we do not
say that this way of stating the case against the
religion of the gospel is in any case to be taken
a true account of the whole matter;
as
so far
* Letters of ATKINSON and MARTINEAU, p. 172,
The Atheism of Reaction.
191
as
my experience has gone, the most zealous
Christians, even when narrow-minded and bigoted,
as they too frequently are, can bear compari-
son, in respect of good works, with the most
decided and thorough-going of the atheistical or
agnostic class; but that there is some truth in it,
and a truth, which it behoves Christian preachers
most seriously to consider, I have long been con-
vinced. There is a style of preaching, the unprac-
tical and unfruitful nature of which has a tendency
to drive persons of a practical turn of mind directly
into irreligion and practical atheism : they see that
something ought to be done for society which the
Church will not do, or the Church cannot do ;
and, therefore, they resort to other and, it may be,
antagonistic agencies. Akin to the one-sidedness
of that theology which preaches faith rather as a
means of justification from past guilt, than as a
habitual formative principle to mould the character
and to direct the life, is the sort of rampant ortho-
doxy which delights in doctrinal exaggeration of
mysteries, and which is never so happy as when it
can plant itself behind the broad shield of unintel-
ligible formulas and traditionary shibboleths, to
pluck Reason by the beard, and bid open defiance
to that grand principle of the Scottish philosophy
192 The Natural History of Atheism.
called common-sense. Those who excite to an
atheistical reaction in this fashion, sin even more
grievously against St. Paul's doctrine in the He-
brews than those so-called federal theologians who
exhaust their whole thought in the inculcation of a
faith, whose principal object is to shake off the bur-
den of inherited guilt which lies upon us from the
sin of our primal father in Paradise. For there is
unquestionably a very strong element of a moral
nature in this faith; and therefore in so far it is
evangelical. But tliat other faith of cataphract
orthodoxy mailed in triple brass, of which we now
speak, is a purely intellectual affair, and as such
altogether outside the pale of that saving faith, by
which sinful souls under gospel preaching are
dragged out of the mire of sensuality, and the
slavery of degrading fashions, into the glorious
liberty of the sons of God. No doubt, as St. Paul
distinctly enough states, there must be a root of
firm doctrinal belief at the bottom of all Christian
faith, or rather, we might say, of all practical faith :
for who will leap from his bed and rouse the town
at midnight, and cry for water, and apply his hand
to the forcing-pump, if he does not believe that the
house is on fire ? Who will prepare to bury his
friend, if he does not believe that he is dead? Who
The Atheism of Reaction.
193
will sow seed in spring, if he does not believe that
it will bear a rich crop of beneficent fruitage in the
autumn ? “He that cometh to God," therefore
unquestionably, “must believe that He is, and
that He is the rewarder of them that diligently
seek Him." But this is quite a different thing
from saying that whoso believeth not this or the
other dogma about the Divine nature shall, with-
out doubt, be eternally damned. Here we have a
usurpation of the rightful throne of an essentially
moral faith, by a faith purely and avowedly intel-
lectual, and which has just as little to do with the
evangelical faith which worketh by love, as any
proposition in Euclid has, about the qualities of tri-
angles, or any Algebraic formula about the relations
of numbers. To any man, with or without lawn
sleeves, who stands up in a Christian congregation,
and fulminates damnation to poor sinful mortals on
such grounds, there is only one reply to be made :
“ Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.”
The spirit from which damnatory declarations of
this kind proceed is a mingled spirit of ignorance,
conceit, presumption, insolence, and pedantry;
and has more to answer for in the way of creating
atheism, than any other fault of Christian preach-
ers that has come under my observation. Against
9
194 The Natural History of Atheism.
declarations of this kind, however solemnly made,
and however traditionally hallowed, the moral and
intellectual nature of the most soundly-constituted
minds rises upin instinctive rebellion; the intellect-
ual nature, because the propounding of dogmas in
a scholastic form about the nature of the Supreme
Being, shows an utter ignorance of the proper func-
tions and limits of the human intellect; and the
moral nature even more emphatically, because to
make fellowship in any religion conditional on the
merely intellectual acceptance of an abstract propo-
sition addressed to the understanding, is to remove
religion altogether out of its own region, where it
can bear fruit, and to transplant it into a soil where
it can show only prickles that fret the skin, and
thorns that go deeply into the flesh-a procedure,
in fact, not a whit less absurd than to plant pota-
toes on bare rocks, and expect that they shall
grow, or to fling a flouncing fish upon the dry
beach, and demand that it shall swim.
So much for the caricatures of faith which, being
mistaken for the genuine portraiture, have a ten-
dency to drive persons of a hasty temper and a
superficial observation into an anti-Christian atti-
tude, or even right off into the dreary silences,
blank vacuities, and blind necessities of speculative
The Atheism of Reaction.
195
atheism. But it is not only in their way of present-
ing faith generally, but in their rash and unreasoned
statement of special points of Christian belief, that
our theologians have greatly erred. What, for
instance, made a greater noise in the world of
theological doctrine at one time than the five points
of the Synod of Dort, which caused the persecution
of Grotius and the noble company of Arminian
doctors in Holland ? Wonderful subtleties and
windy battlements, all of which no man of sense at
the present day thinks worthy even of a passing
regard. Why? Because these famous five points
all relate to God's decrees, and not to man's work;
and therefore are properly left to God, while we
attend to our duty. No doubt St. Paul has laid
down the doctrine of divine decrees grandly in the
Epistle to the Romans; and he was obliged to do
so, in arguing with the Jews, who nourished the
conceit that they were a chosen people, to whom,
by preference, God must communicate his saving
knowledge, while the rest of the world was allowed
to sleep in the darkest ignorance, and to rot in the
lowest sensuality. To beat down such a narrow-
minded conceit and presumptuous notion of heri.
ditary privilege, the great Apostle was obliged to
state the doctrine that, though all privilege comes
196 The Natural History of Atheism.
from Divine decree and special Divine favour, it
does so, not for the purpose of creating a ground
of vain boast on the part of the favoured people or
person, but for the purpose and with the effect of
opening up a higher sphere of action, with a more
serious responsibility ; that is to say, in other
words, he taught the doctrine of predestination
and reprobation, not in the way of arbitrary selec-
tion and rejection, as the extreme Calvinistic theo-
logians have rashly taught, but in the form of a
necessary law in the moral world, according to
which divinely conferred gifts—and all gifts come
from God-when abused, lead to forfeiture and
loss, when improved, to greater gain and more
distinguished privilege. According to this com-
mon-sense view—and it is the plain and obvious
drift of the Epistle—all the fierce and bloody glad-
iatorship between Calvinists and Arminians about
the orthodoxy of the five points of a scholastic
doctrine of Divine decrees was an episode in the
great epos of Christian life, interpolated by men
who were as remote from the broad, practical drift
of the Pauline gospel as they were devoid of the
common feelings of humanity. St. Paul, the inno-
cent occasion of all this barbarity, would have
made short scores of their interminable debates
The Atheism of Reaction.
197
and overbearing dogmas. “ Gentlemen," he
would have said, with that fine instinct of practi-
cal sagacity which directed all his teachings,
“ Gentlemen, you beat the wind: Necessity is
true, because nothing can escape the wide embrace
of the Divine Sovereignty : Liberty--that is, lib-
erty within certain limits, is a fact-because the
common instinct of humanity proves that it is so :
you must believe both, and quarrel about neither.
But believe not metaphysically or scholastically,
but practically, and in such a way as the Jews, my
countrymen, did not believe, and suffered accord-
ingly.” I have brought forward this matter spe-
cially because, though the five Calvinistic points
are now scarcely known by name to many well-
educated persons, they are all involved in the cate-
chism used in the elementary schools of Scotland,
and have to my knowledge occasioned no small
amount of misery and soul-torture to young per-
sons beginning seriously to look into the great
truths of religion and morals. Thoughtful young
persons in Scotland, under the influence of such
Calvinistic teaching, will be found vexing and per-
plexing themselves most lamentably about their
special election or reprobation ; than which a more
unprofitable exercise, or more out of place, cannot
198 The Natural History of Atheism.
well be imagined. All such questions belong
either to the past or to the future, and as such lie
in the bosom of the Infinite. Man is a creature of
the present; and he must strike the nail upon the
head in the special work before him, not because
he has been predestinated to do so, or because it
may turn out after trial that he has not been pre-
destinated to do so, but simply because it is before
him. With the decrees of God, however promi-
nently they may stand in the vestibule of the As-
sembly's Catechism, a young man on the threshold
of life has no more to do than he has with the
creation of the world, or with the consummation
of all things.
Another dogma, with the inculcation of which
the Calvinistic theologians have done good service
to the anti-Christian tendencies of some respect-
able classes of the community, is the doctrine of
original sin. With regard to this, Coleridge, who,
in other matters, spoke vaguely enough, said the
proper thing in a single word—" Original sin is
not a doctrine, but a FACT." So stated, it is only
what we see every day before our eyes, and can,
of course, form no special objection against Chris-
tianity. That out of good seed a good plant will
grow, and out of bad seed a bad plant, and that
The Atheism of Reaction.
199
from generation to generation, till the action of
fresh favourable influences cause a change, is a
principle of which the exemplifications are as wide
as the range of organized life upon the globe.
Books have been written on hereditary virtues and
hereditary vices; and every family portrait-gallery,
going back for long centuries, notwithstanding
strange variations, arising naturally from cross affin-
ities, will revert now and then to a striking trick
of the original type. So far, so well. But now
in comes our cataphract theologic doctor, with his
host of dogmatic .exaggerations, and thunders out
his dogma of inherited GUILT, at which straightway
an honest thinker's whole moral nature bristles up
in rebellion. Moral merit and demerit are in the
very nature of things personal; to imagine their
transference is to destroy their definition. If every
baby when born, in virtue of an act of transgres-
sion committed some six or eight thousand years
ago by the father of the race, must be confessed
“hell-deserving sinner," and lying on the brink
of eternal damnation as soon as it lies on its
nurse's lap, then every man of sound moral feeling
is entitled to protest against a doctrine of which
such a cruel absurdity is a necessary postulate.
This brings us to another stone of stumbling,
a
200 The Natural History of Atheism.
I mean,
which the Christian doctors have set up, and which
still remains as a very ugly porter to many persons
standing at the gate of the house which is called
Beautiful, and barring a kindly entrance.
of course, the doctrine of eternal punishments.
The ancient Greeks also taught this doctrine; but
they taught it in a very modified form, as any one
may see in the sixth book of Virgil, or in the
more detailed descriptions of his great predecessor
in that teaching—the philosopher Plato :
“ Sedet, æternumque sedebit,
Infelix Theseus."
" Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos."
Only a few flaming offenders were condemned to
this state of hopeless reprobation and inexhaustible
torture; and besides, as part of a theology not
laid down in rigid propositions, but floating loosely
in the shape of traditional fancies, such things
could be stated in books, without giving any great
offence to serious thinkers. They quietly pushed
this and other offensive matters aside, and clung
to what was good and profitable. But the Chris-
tian churches, unfortunately, cannot do so. They
have committed themselves to a theology, drawn
up by scholastic persons, in a series of formal prop-
ositions which challenge contradiction and refuse
The Atheism of Reaction.
201
compromise. Therefore, the doctrine of infinite
torture for finite sins is still stoutly maintained as
a point of Christian faith, and as stoutly disowned
by a large class of benevolent and thoughtful per-
sons, who look upon such a doctrine as utterly in-
consistent with the conception of a wise and ben-
evolent Being. * Now, if there was not a great
deal of dogmatic obstinacy, a fair amount of her-
meneutical ignorance, and a considerable vein of
cowardice also in the ecclesiastical mind, this
stumbling-block might easily be removed. It does
not require any very profound scholarship to know
that the word aiovuos, which we translate everlast-
ing, does not signify eternity absolutely and meta-
physically: but only popularly, as when we say
that a man is an eternal fool, meaning only that he
is a very great fool. Biblical interpreters also
ought to bear in mind, which they constantly seem
determined rather to forget, that the Scriptures
are not written in the style of a metaphysical or
curiously-scientific treatise ; but the language
throughout is essentially popular, and perhaps
necessarily with somewhat of that vagueness which
J. S. Mill's Autobiography, chap. ii. Read also Childers' Pali
Dictionary, article NIBBANAM, where he compares the Buddhist
annihilation with the Christian damnation-not to the advantage
of the latter.
9*
202 The Natural History of Atheism.
OF
characterises colloquial language as contrasted
with the style of a professorial lecture, or a scien-
tific definition.
Another stumbling-block which theologians
have laid in the way of the devotees of physical
science, is the CREATION OUT NOTHING.
This dogma, which, as every scholar knows, is not
necessarily contained in any place, whether of the
Old or New Testament, arose in the Jewish
Church, and has been stamped with orthodox
authority in Christendom, partly from a pious
desire to magnify the Divine Omnipotence, partly
from the timid stupidity of clinging to the letter,
instead of breathing the spirit of Scripture; and
partly also from the evil trick which we have just
mentioned of importing metaphysics and scholas-
tic definitions into the Bible, from which all the
Scriptures are the furthest possible removed.
Now the objection to this doctrine on the part of
modern thinkers I conceive to be this — that,
though not perhaps absolutely impossible, it is
contrary to all known experience, and highly im-
probable, if we are to judge of the constitution of
things from what we see, not from what we choose
to imagine. It is the vulgar imagination which
delights to represent the Supreme Being as a sort
The Atheism of Reaction.
203
of omnipotent harlequin, launching the fiat of his
volition, as the nimble gentleman in the panto-
mime strikes the table with his wand, and out
comes a man, or a monkey, or something else, out
of nothing. This is man's crude conception; but
God's ways are not as man's ways: and his way is
EVOLUTION. Nothing is created out of nothing;
and mere volition, even of an omnipotent Being,
cannot be conceived as bringing into existence a
thing of an absolutely opposite nature, called mat-
ter. What we see everywhere in us and above us,
and around us, simply is, that the present grows
out of the past, as the future grows out of the
present. Growth, therefore, necessary and essen-
tial growth, by inherent reasonable force, is the
proper expression of the great Divine fact of the
universe. To us dependent ephemeral creatures,
all existence is a Divine miracle; and the continu-
ity of that Divine miracle in the shape of what we
call growth is, so far as we can see, the eternal
form of the Divine creativeness. The absolute
dualism of mind and matter which is implied in the
received orthodoxy of the Church, is not warrant-
ed by any fact that exact science can recognise ;
nowhere do we find mind acting without a mate-
rial instrument, nowhere matter absolutely divorc-
204 The Natural History of Atheism.
ed from the action of inherent forces, inasmuch as
even the most motionless statical condition of
things most solid is always produced by a balance
of forces in some way or other-forces which, if
they are not blind, but acting according to a calcu-
lated law, as they manifestly do, are only another
name for Mind. This view of the constitution of
the universe, though quite familiar to the wisest
of the ancient Greeks, when propounded in the face
of our orthodox Christian theology, is generally
disowned with a certain pious horror as Panthe-
ism, a word to which a great chorus of thoughtless
and ill-informed people are straightway ready to
echo back, Atheism-with the feeling that the two
terms, though etymologically as opposed as white
and black, are practically the same. Now the re-
ligious world here is evidently confounding two
very different things under a common name, as
the word Sophist, for instance, through the shift-
ing phases of more than two thousand years of a
literary life, has been used to denote the most
varied types of the intellectual man, from the pro-
foundest thinker to the shallowest quibbler. Pan-
theism, scientifically understood, has nothing to
do either with materialism or with atheism. It is
opposed to Bitheism or to Dualism, and simply
The Atheism of Reaction.
205
denies the existence of two opposite entities in the
world of Divine reality, while it asserts the exist-
ence of only one. The world is essentially one;
and the All, though externally many, is, when
traced to its deepest roots, not different from the
One; as the human body, for instance, is both
one and many; the fingers, which are five, be-
longing nevertheless to the unity of the hand;
and the upper and lower extremities, though four,
belonging in the same way to the essential unity
of the body. The term Pantheism, therefore, is
not opposed to unity, or to the principle of unity
in the world, which is God; and a Pantheist, as
Hegel well said of Spinoza, may more properly
be said to deny the world, than to deny God. It
is possible, however, for a Pantheist to be such a
one-sided creature as not to perceive the central
unity which binds the cosmos into a grand organ-
ized whole. He may look only at the outside of
appearances, and see nothing but an infinite drift
and jostle and jabble of unreasoned atoms, pro-
ducing, in some blind, utterly inexplicable fashion
a thing on which we impose an imaginary unity
by the use of the term universe. In this case the
pantheist becomes what is usually called a mate-
rialist, or an atheist of the most hopeless and in-
206 The Natural History of Atheism.
curable class. But whoever holds by the two
poles of actual existence—the év and the nâv of
the Greeks-or the centre and the periphery, if the
analogy of a circle may seem to suit better---this
pantheist, by whatever name he may be called,
simply denies dualism, and asserts the co-essential
and co-eternal necessary existence of the internal
and the external, the one and the many, in the
constitution of the universe. His theory affects
only the nature of the bond which binds together
the outside and the inside of the All. If, accord-
ing to Dr. Paley's analogy taken literally, the
world may by a mechanical generation have some-
times been conceived as a watch made by a watch-
maker, according to the pantheistic way of look-
ing at things the world might be called an animal
-elov swov, as Plato, we remember, has it, in the
concluding sentence of the “ Timæus." Nor will
it do to say that a man who is a pantheist, even in
the best sense, must necessarily deny religion, be-
cause his theory destroys human personality, and
denies individual responsibility, on the foundation
of which all human society, as well as all religious
obligation, is constituted. Freedom, personality,
and responsibility are facts which no theological or
metaphysical theories can meddle with, any more
The Atheism of Reaction.
207
than they can with generation, or appetite, or di-
gestion. The charge of annihilating individual
responsibility can be brought against Calvinism
with as much and as little justice as against Spi-
nozism. The answer to all such speculative objec-
tions from transcendental theories, when brought
into the world of practice, is a fact and a flogging :
somewhat in the style that we read of Zeno the
Stoic, who, like Calvin, was a great predestinarian,
and on one occasion, being about to flog his slave
for an act of theft, had his philosophy thrown
abruptly in his face, with the apology—“Yes,
master, I did steal the article ; but I could not
help it: it was ordained.” To which the philoso-
pher calmly replied :-"Yes; but it was ordained
also that whoso steals shall be flogged !”
The offence given by theologians to reasonable
men, when they set themselves in an authoritative
and oracular style to interpret the Divine pro-
cedure, and to point out what pious people call
“judgments," is so manifold that it would require
a whole chapter to tell off even the heads of its
multiplied absurdity. The general principle that
lies at the bottom of all these false readings of
Providence may be described as a tendency to
look at every manifestation of Divine energy that
208 The Natural History of Atheism.
falls under our eye in the light of human interests,
and from the narrow human point of view only.
This is an element which plays a prominent part
in all early mythologies; and we shall deceive
ourselves very much indeed, if we imagine that it
plays no part in our sermons and our books of godly
edification now. And yet if we consider the mag-
nitude of the mundane system, and the complexity
of the spheral relations, we ought to perceive that
few things can be more absurd than to imagine
that a terrible thunderstorm, for instance, or a
swell of the waters in Morayshire or the Sandwich
Islands, or a failure in the potato crop, must
necessarily have something to do with the follies
or the faults of some person or persons
suffer from such calamities. Generally speaking
we may say, that the discomfort which any indi-
vidual creature may at any time suffer in the
course of his career from the general arrangements
of Providence, affords not the slightest ground for
his looking on these discomforts as having any
special personal reference to himself. It is differ-
ent, of course, with evil which arises in our own
little world, both the cause and the cure of which
may oftentimes be sufficiently patent. If a man
drink half-a-dozen glasses of strong spirits, and
who may
The Atheism of Reaction.
209
lose the use of his legs to-day, and find an un-
pleasant throbbing in his temples to-morrow, this
is “ a judgment” which he may interpret, without
presumption, and with great profit. But if an
invasion of woes and a prostration of all prosperity
should overtake him, such as that which over-
whelmed the patriarch Job, then let him read that
wonderful old theological drama carefully, and
learn to hold his tongue, and to withhold his
counsel in the presence of the Most High. Man
may know many things, but he has no vocation to
set up as an interpreter-general of the Divine pro-
cedure, whether in reference to himself or to his
fellow-men. I say it with sorrow; but there is in
a certain class of pious books a great deal too
much of this theological interpretation of circum-
stances, as if God were doing everything in the
large scheme of his varied universe specially with
reference to “ the frames and feelings ” of a petty
individual, of no more consequence in the system
of things than the single ant of a single ant-hill in
the economy of a large forest. Answers to prayer
in the biography of pious persons are often as
ridiculous as interpretations of judgments are pre-
sumptuous. If there is not the slightest reason to
conclude that those on whom the Tower of Siloam
210 The Natural History of Atheism.
fell were greater sinners than those on whom it fell
not, and, if they justly got an evasive answer who
asked whether this man sinned or his parents that
he was born blind, as little right have you to con-
clude that a pound-note, which came to you from
an unknown hand through the Post-office, at the
moment when you were at the point of need for
it, came to you by special Divine interposition
because you had that morning poured forth a
particularly fervent prayer. All these “ interpo-
sitions" and " interferences" are the product of a
devout conceit, that can be satisfied with nothing
less in the way of religion than such a constant
display of petty preferences as a spoiled child
receives from a partial mamma. The idea of a
God constantly interfering in answer to prayer, or
otherwise, is one of the most anthropomorphic of
all theological conceptions. God cannot be said
to “interfere," with the general order of Provi-
dence, any more than the steam can be said to in-
terfere with the regular motions of the steam-
engine. He who is everywhere the spring of all
motion, and the source of all vital energy, cannot
be supposed to be called out of his way to answer
any invocator's particular need. If the wind is
blowing west, it blows west from a Divine neces-
The Atheism of Reaction.
2II
sity in the harmonious currents of the atmosphere,
which can no more be changed by your wanting it
to blow east, than Niagara can stop its swell
because you have thoughtlessly cast your shallop
upon its sweep. Those who wish to pray with a
reasonable piety, to which no atheism can object,
will find in the Lord's prayer, or in the prayer of
Socrates, a model which cannot be excelled: but
rewards and punishments for violated law lie
deeply seated in the general system of the All-
wise government, and will not be evoked by any
special application even of the most pious. For
theology of this puerile description, Homer must
be quoted as an authority, not Paul. The Chris-
tian Jove neither launches special thunderbolts
to strike the heads of special offenders, nor pre-
pares sugar-plums for the good boys and girls
of the grand State church or the unrecognised
conventicle.
Let no man imagine we are unwarrantably hard
on the religious world, when we mention these
things. The religious world is just as liable as any
other world to the general human weakness of
sliding into a caricature of itself, and presenting
these distorted features for general admiration as a
correct likeness. Besides, it is of the very nature
212 The Natural History of Atheism.
of a high ideal to be unattainable, to admit only of
approximation; and one of the highest compli-
ments that can be paid to Christianity is that, when
purely presented, it is apt to seem a great deal too
good for the creatures to whom it is addressed.
And, so far as our present purpose is concerned,
looking upon the profession of atheism, even in
the modified form of agnosticism, as a monstrosity
in the moral history of the world, explicable only
on the theory of reaction or revulsion from certain
abusive and offensive aspects of Christianity in
these times, we cannot exonerate ourselves from
the necessary work of marshalling forth these
abuses and offences in all their nakedness. A few
still remain, not of a doctrinal, but of an ethical,
social, or æsthetical character, which we shall now
shortly allude to. First there comes asceticism
and monkery-a very sad and lamentable chapter
in the history of the Church, and which, in so far
as it has triumphed, completely wipes out the
grand practical distinction between Christianity
and Buddhism. Whatever we know not about
Buddha, one thing certainly we do know, that he
commenced with being a licentious person and a
voluptuary, and ended in the character of a mendi-
cant monk ; and succeeded as indeed Brahman-
The Atheism of Reaction.
213
ism did in a considerable measure before him-in
impressing this ridiculous type of an unnatural and
unsocial sanctity as a model for human admiration
from the Ganges to the Amoor. It is needless to
say that a religion which declares war against the
fundamental instincts of human nature must
always fail, equally on the one side in regulating
the passions of the thoughtless many, and on the
other in commanding the suffrages of the thought-
ful few. The principle of all asceticism is not to
regulate, but to extirpate ; but, though the masses
may stare at the man who does violence to all his
natural instincts, under the name of piety, and
rends his flesh to prove the strength of his will,
they will never be induced to follow his example ;
and as for the few persons who give themselves up
to speculation on the principles of human action
whom the world calls philosophers, whatever name
they may bear, like the poets they have only one
test by which they measure all things—NATURE.
If it be contrary to man's nature that he should live
like a mere pig, or a tiger, or any form of brute
beast, it is equally contrary to his nature not to
like a good dinner, and to shrink from a glass of
good wine. Philosophy recognises no virtue in
walking with peas in a man's shoes, or quarrelling
214 The Natural History of Atheism.
with the butter on a man's toast. It is perfectly
true that in all enjoyment, whether of wine or of
butter-toast, there is a certain element of danger;
the too much is always at hand, and chiefly in the
very acme of pleasant excitement, to turn the sub-
lime of enjoyment into the ridiculous or the low.
In this view there is always safety in abstinence;
but there is also weakness—weakness, and cow-
ardice, and meagreness and poverty of spirit, and
an offence against nature so gross, that the very
aspect of it is enough to tempt a man to rush into
its opposite. I, for one, can never look upon these
sallow saints perusing skulls, and gazing up into
Heaven through the narrow window-slits of a dark
cell, which you see on the walls of all our great
picture-galleries, without feeling myself driven for
relief into a heathenish sympathy with a brawny
Hercules, a blooming Venus, or a rubicund
Dionysus. Always and everywhere enjoyment
is natural ; abstinence, self-mortification, and self-
crucifixion in every shape (except by way of
training for some special purpose, as in the case of
the Greek athletes), abnormal, monstrous, inhu-
man, and absurd. And yet in the Lives of the
Saints, and elsewhere, this purely negative, pedan-
tic, and ridiculous sort of virtue is set up before
The Atheism of Reaction.
215
the Church to admire, as the ideal of the highest
excellence to which human nature can attain. As
reasonably might a flower avoid the sun for fear
of being burnt up, as a man forswear enjoyment
for fear of falling into vice. A certain amount of
peril is the price which we pay for all pleasure; and
whoso for fear of the peril refuses the pleasure,
must sit at a smoky fireside, or in a dank cell, and
rot his life away in a spiritual or a carnal mouldi-
ness-in either case stupidly.
We have neither monks nor nuns in Great
Britain just now, I believe, of the stupid kind
which Buddha in the East, and the Romanists of
the Middle Ages, perched upon the platform of a
false ideal. Our nuns are mere sisters of charity,
who devote themselves to deeds of active benevo-
lence, and wear a certain funereal dress more by the
way of protection against rude insult than from any
worship of death, or perverse conceit of unnatural
mortification. To such a withdrawal from the bus-
tle and whirl of common life into a quiet corner for
a special rational purpose there can be no objec-
tion; only let not such persons imagine that they
are more holy than their secular sisters, who allow
themselves to browse at large on the broad com-
mon of the world without any artificial restrictions.
216 The Natural History of Atheism.
Perhaps they are more pure and more philanthro-
pic: perhaps they are only more narrow and more
meagre. But in some parts of these islands, es-
pecially the north-west of Scotland, we have a
school of sombre religionists and black prophets,
who, though not professedly monks, make their
boast of a certain artificial gloomy piety and
morose morality, which leads by direct revulsion
into sensuality, irreligion, and practical atheism.
Our newspaper columns and anecdote-books are
full of strange stories about ministers and men in-
fected with this dismal superstition. Mr. Buckle,
who, for some time, passed for a great philoso-
pher, was of opinion that this lowering Calvinism
of the north was the natural product of the savage
bens of West Ross-shire, and the frowning crags
of Glencoe : a theory unfortunately rendered sus-
picious by the fact that Calvinism was born in
Picardy, not in Poolewe or Ballachulish, and that
the original Calvin in Geneva was as stern a dis-
ciplinarian, and as far removed from Luther's idea
of the model man “who loves wine, women, and
song," as any Macdonald or McIntosh beneath the
Grampians. But whatever the cause may be, the
fact undoubtedly remains. There is a class of
Christian ministers in the Scottish Highlands, spe-
The Atheism of Reaction.
217
cially amongst the clergy of the Free Church, who
declare openly that dancing, and singing, and
cards, and theatres are deadly sins, and whosoever
has anything to do with such amusements must be
looked upon as the servant of the devil, and in dan-
ger of everlasting damnation. It would appear as
if these persons wished to change all the brightness
of the moral world into the similitude of their own
bleak moors and black bogs, with no sound but the
melancholy cry of the pewit, the whistling of the
cold wind, or the drizzle of the persistent rain. Or
it might perhaps seem that they wished to hold in
their own hands a despotic monopoly of all vital
utterances and all moral manifestations of the hu-
man creature : no music, but the long-drawn drone
of their melancholy psalm-tunes; no meetings, but
prayer-meetings; no eloquence, but the alternate
whine and screech of their own sepulchral sermons.
One must speak not mincingly about these gospel-
lers, because they unquestionably do as much as hu-
man beings can do to drive all healthy-minded per-
sons out of the bosom of the Church and into the
bosom of Mr. Atkinson and Miss Martineau, and
any kindly devotees of the agnostic persuasion
who may spread their arms to receive them. The
airs of solemn authority assumed by these persons
IO
218 The Natural History of Atheism.
in remote districts where they have no one to con-
tradict them, are almost incredible. One of them,
I have been informed, in a district of the wide
county of Inverness, wishing to abolish merry
meetings and dances of every kind in his parish,
and knowing that a fiddle or some musical instru-
ment was a necessary adjunct of such assemblies,
took occasion one day, when her husband, who
was a fiddler, happened to be absent, to call on a
woman of his congregation, in order to give her a
serious remonstrance on the grave sin of fiddling
at balls and weddings. The woman confessed
that it was not exactly the most saintly occupa-
tion, but she did not see there was any harm in it;
that even King David, the man after God's own
heart, danced before the Lord, which he could not
have done without a fiddle, or some such instru-
ment; and besides that, her husband might often
earn a pound in the half year by his fiddling,
which could not be well wanted when the rent was
to be paid. "Well," said the minister, “here's a
pound for you, and give me the fiddle.” The
woman obeyed : she brought down the fiddle and
pocketed the pound, and the reverend gentleman
forthwith broke the back of the instrument with a
violent bang upon the table, and flung the wreck
The Atheism of Reaction.
219
of it into the fire. This was dramatic enough ; but
the fiddle was not yet exterminated. The woman,
true to her descent from Eve, had, on this trying
occasion, encountered the clerical bear with a
touch of the wisdom of the serpent. She had
brought down an old obsolete fiddle from the
garret, and left the real offender unharmed in his
case !
There is one special point in which Scottish
Christianity stands on its point of honour, and
which, of course also, plays a prominent part in
the grave religiosity of these trans-Grampian
Pharisees; we mean the observance of the Sab-
bath; an observance in the main highly com-
mendable, and to be looked on with pride, as one
of those fountains from which Scotsmen draw that
calm strength and moral seriousness which makes
them so efficient and so reliable in the earnest
work of the world, wherever they are found. But
there is undeniably a superstitious Judaical and
anti-Christian element in the notions of these
Highland ministers about the sabbath, which must
be openly condemned, and practically contradict-
ed on all occasions, because it tends to make reli-
gion both disagreeable and ridiculous. We have
reason to believe that in most Highland families
220 The Natural History of Atheism.
no minister's daughter would venture to touch the
piano on Sunday, even to play psalm tunes : and
in most parts of Scotland, very few clergymen
have courage enough to show themselves outside
of their garden wall on that day. I have known
the case of a landlady in a civilised' town, who
dismissed a lodger because he sung hymns to the
piano on the Lord's day, and gave her house an
ill-name. A religion which thus commends itself
to the notice of the world by the unnatural repres-
sion of healthy emotion, and the sympathetic cul-
ture of a stupid seriousness, need not be surprised,
if in the biographies of not a few notable persons
it finds itself enumerated among the agencies that
led to perilous flirtations with various kinds of
latitudinarianism, and then clean away into the
hostile ranks of No-Church.
Two points of offence more, and we have done.
England has seen, in these latter days, in the
matter of sacerdotal claims, and ceremonial mum-
meries, a phenomenon to make the stars blush.
There is, and can be, no such thing as a priest-
hood in Christianity : the Egyptians had a power-
ful hierarchy, and so had the Jews; the caste
system of the Brahmans was another variety of the
same rigid form of social organization ; but the
The Atheism of Reaction.
221
character of Christianity is essentially popular,
personal, and democratic, and knows nothing of
privileged orders, much less of persons with thau-
maturgic virtue in their right hands, and a magical
power in their touch. This is a phenomenon that
belongs partly to the vulgarest phases of Heathen-
ism, and partly is a stupid importation of Judaism
into Christianity, which deprives it of its essentially
humanitarian character, and confounds it with all
that is most puerile and trifling in the practice of
the lowest superstitions. In Christianity the con-
gregation is the Church ; the people are the
priests ; and the prayers and praises of the saints
are the incense. St. Peter taught this distinctly in
a public letter eighteen hundred years ago ( 1 Pet.
ii. 5), but his successors in Rome slid rapidly into
a total forgetfulness of the truth; and the high-
church party in the English Church at the present
moment seem emulously bent on showing whether
they will do the greater insult to the religion
which they profess by the insolence of their
churchly claims, the puerility of their devotional
services, or the narrowness of their human sympa-
thies. If religion is to consist in a marshalled
array of antic observances, postures, genuflexions,
bowings, dresses and decorations, and all sorts of
222 The Natural History of Atheism.
prescribed externalities, by all means let us raise
the ancient Greeks from the dead, to help us at
least to do the thing naturally and gracefully.
But a man who has any smack of the New Testa-
ment must know how very far this curious concern
about ecclesiastical mumming is from the mind of
Christ, and from the soundness of apostolic teach-
ing. “Let all things be done decently and in
order !” is the wise precept of the great apostle,
in regard to the external arrangements of sacred
worship; but to make a conscience of any mere
outward show and paraded symbolism, is to run
right in the teeth of the great text which, applied
to our times, simply says, that in Christ Jesus
there is neither priest nor presbyter, nor High
Church, nor Low Church, nor attitudinarian, nor
latitudinarian, but a new creature.
The other offence with which we conclude this
bill of indictment against Churches and Church-
men, is of a political nature. The Churchman, it
was written long ago by the great poetical moral-
ist, is a creature“ fond of power." Well, he has
great power naturally by virtue of the great hu-
man instinct of reverence which he represents ;
and, if to this power, which belongs to his spiritual
office, there be added great worldly dignity, a
The Atheism of Reaction.
223
more than average share of the good things of this
life, and perhaps an honoured place in the supreme
counsel of the nation, in all this there is nothing
wrong, or rather a great good, if a society be
otherwise well managed and justly balanced;
nevertheless, as things go, such a proud position
of the clergy is not without danger to the Church,
lest it should become worldly, and danger to
religion, lest it should become identified with
odious oligarchic privilege and selfish oligarchic
exclusiveness. The democratic atheist is a species
of the unlovely genus which we specified above;
and there cannot be the slightest doubt that where,
as in England, democracy as the form of the civil
government is combined with sacerdotal glorifica-
tion among the clergy, and a distinct aristocratic
type in Church polity, the democratic atheist is an
animal that will show front in large centres of civic
life pretty confidently, and cast his volleys of un-
gracious denial into the sun's face, not without
observance. This, of course, is not meant as any
argument for the dis-establishment of any of the
British Churches; it is merely noticed pathologi-
cally as helping to account for a moral disease,
and an intellectual perversion more widely spread
among certain sections of the working classes in
224 The Natural History of Atheism.
our large towns than many persons are apt to
imagine.
It remains now, in order to bring the matter to
a more distinct and definite bearing, that we pre-
sent the atheism or agnosticism of the present day
before the reader in the words of its own advo-
cates; that we may see how far their opinions are
a mere illustration of the vulgar law of reaction ;
or how far anything like a substantial reason,
sound logic, or subtle sophistry lies at the bottom
of their abnormal speculations. If it should turn
out, on coming face to face with the utterances of
those negative philosophers, that there is really
nothing more in what they urge than a hasty re-
vulsion from the real or imaginary aberrations of
the received orthodoxy, it will be at once a great
confirmation to sound theism, and a vindication of
human reason from one of its strangest aberra-
tions. The folly or presumption of the unreason-
ably orthodox will appear to have supplied a pro-
vocation which has driven the reasonably heterodox
into a position of which they would otherwise
have been ashamed. Protagoras--one of the most
notable of the ancient Greek sophists in the age
of Pericles-commenced his most famous book
on the principles of human knowledge, quite
The Atheism of Reaction.
225
in the spirit of our modern agnostics in these
words :
"If there be gods,
Or if there be not, overjumps my ken :
But this I know-I am a man, and take
Of things that be the measure for myself,
And things that be not."
Now, if this most reputable of the sophists--for
Plato paints him in the most favourable colours-
meant by this famous sentence merely that he did
not know whether Jove, Athena, and Apollo, as
they were then conceived and worshipped by the
Greeks, existed or not, and was determined, as a
practical man, not to care, he said what no im-
partial thinker now can blame him for. But if he
meant to say that he believed in no self-existent
Divine power underlying these names, and saw no
cause for supposing the existence of any such
power, we should say he was a fool, or a man not
to be dealt with reasonably, as not perceiving that
a world everywhere full of reasonable construction
could be supposed to come into existence, or to
exist for ever, without a reasonable substratum.
Exactly so with our modern agnostics. If we find
that by the general term atheism or agnosticism
they merely mean to deny certain popular concep-
tions about the Supreme Being, which they cannot
Ιο
226 The Natural History of Atheism.
believe, this is an intelligible position : they may
be right or wrong in their notions ; but their atti-
tude is not unworthy of rational beings, and will be
judged of more or less leniently by the impartial
spectator, according to the greater or less amount
of the provocation from the unreasonable orthodox
which they may seem to have received. When,
on the other hand, we find them flying off in a fit
of hasty revulsion, and, from the prevalence of
what they believe to be, and what may actually be,
shallow, perverse, and altogether unworthy notions
about the Supreme Being, concluding; at a jump,
that there is no God, we can only pity the morbid
sensibility of a temper which had the power to
drive reasonable men into so unreasonable an atti-
tude. Let us hear, therefore, what they have to
say for themselves. First, Miss Martineau—or
rather, her father in atheism, Mr. Atkinson--and
then Professor Tyndall; for these are two of the
most respectable, and whom the more coarse and
rabid of the negative faction can only be benefited
by accepting as their representatives.
MR. ATKINSON,
I. “Instinct, passion, thought, are effects of organized sub-
stances.”— Page 6.
2. “For every effect there is a sufficient cause; and all causes
The Atheism of Reaction.
227
are material causes influenced by surrounding circumstances;
which is nothing more than' matter being influenced by matter."
-Page 7.
3. ** What use is there in disputing with a Mohammedan about
his prophet, or his harem? or with the Roman Catholic about his
saints and his transubstantiation? or with the English Protestant
about his dull formalism, his services, and his worldly pride, and vul-
gar regard for wealth ?"-Page 1o.
4. “Mind is the product of the brain; it is the manifestation or
expression of the brain in action.”—Page 17.
5.
" Before animal existence there were electric currents and
aroma from vegetation, and solemn music from winds; then sen-
tience was provided ; and after more ages consciousness followed
upon sentience.”—Page 26.
6. “It is only knowledge of the laws of mind and the law of
love, and exhibitions of goodness and mercy, that will reform the
world. Inferior minds will, doubtless, always be influenced by
rewards and punishments; but these rewards and punishments should
be of a more wholesome character, and not such as brutalise, and
encourage the selfish impulses. Preaching the horrors of a hell and
eternal damnation will never induce reverence for higher things, or
reform the world." - Page 136.
7. “We must profit by Bacon's admonitions, and not mix up
theology with science; we must not see ourselves reflected—see
the ghosts of ourselves in Nature, and imagine we recognise design
or a hunian origin of things. We must follow our great master,
Bacon, and make a stand against the fallacy of natural theology,
and that exceedingly weak argument of Paley's about the watch,
which only places the difficulty a little further off, and confounds
the idea of creation with design or manufacture. To design is
human. Men design - by following the laws which constitute
Nature.”—Page 139.
8. “Ignorance sees Nature in parts, personifies effects, and takes
them for causes. It creates horrors and spectres, and then startles
at its own creations. Ignorance imagines gods and devils in
legions. Knowledge establishes the true relations of things in a
whole, and has only one God; and that incomprehensible and
228 The Natural History of Atheism.
unknown, and cannot admit a principle of Evil, much less a
personal demon-an embodiment of all villainy; but, on the con-
trary, sees good in evil, and the working of general laws for the
general good; and sees no more sin in a crooked disposition than
in a crooked stick in the water, or in a hump-back, or a squint.
Ignorance conceives its will to be free : a strange arrogance, if it
could see it. Knowledge recognises universal law, and that nothing
can be free or by chance—no, not even God; but that God is the
substance of law, and origin of all things.”—Page 141.
9. “There is a trinity in unity described by Bacon which seems
to offer a sound commencement of philosophizing : matter, forin,
and the principle of motion, or the power or mind of Nature, if
such expressions be preferred. . . . . All is change-change eter-
nal. Motion is fundamental to the constitution of Nature; and the
forms of matter and the condition of mind (which is one form of
the properties of matter) are all passing phenomena, fleeting and
various as the wind, equally determined by law, bound down by
the adamantine chain of necessity. There is nothing stable but
what we conceive to be fundamental to all these forms and
changes, but which is beyond sense-impressions. We assume a
something and a principle because the form of mind requires it, as
a thing essential, though unknown; and it is this which I, wrongly
enough, perhaps, termed God.”—Page 170.
Philosophy finds no God in Nature; no personal Being or
Creator, nor sees the want of any.”—Page 173.
- If men will make a fable for what is beyond our compre-
hension, let the poetry be sublime and worthy of the subject. Let
the God be an ideal abstract of all that is unimpassioned, noble,
and elevating; and, above all, let it be a mystery-not a thing
carved in stone, or shaped out in blood and bone; a thing of
human passion and imperfections, fabricating that which it after-
wårds finds imperfect, and repenting of having made it.”—Page 174.
12. “In Nature there can be no favouritism or predestination,
though all things be fated as being according to law-law which
rules impartially, though individuals suffer cruel extremities from
necessity; all evil, however, having some tendency towards univer-
sal good, as manure and decaying matter are the substances essen-
IO.
II.
The Atheism of Reaction.
229
tial to regeneration and the golden harvest. But men fancy that
they recognise the doings of a mind like their own in Nature,
instead of perceiving that they themselves are of a form cast from
Nature, and a response to the surface or phenomenal form of things
without. Thus deluding themselves, they wander after final causes,
and by an inverted reason see their own image in Nature, and
imagine design and a Designer-creation and a Creator ; as if the
laws of matter were not fundamental, and sufficient in themselves,
and design were not human, and simply an imitation; or, as Bacon
designates it, 'a memory with an application.' To call Nature's
doings, and the fitness and form of things, design, is absurd. Man
designs; nature is.”—Page 175.
13 “What can be more noble and more glorious than a calm
and joyful indifference about self and the future, in merging the
individual in the general good, the general good in universal
Nature? And what are all our creeds and conventionalities but
empty vanities, a false show, the swaddling-clothes of children,
the crutches on which decaying age, broken down by false stimu-
lants, supports itself ?”-Page 189.
14. “He is taught to respect this morality of vengeance and of
partiality; that man can do no good of himself, and yet has a free
will; and that the soul or life can be separated as an entity, and
be independent of the living thing. He is taught that few are
chosen to heaven, but the greater number to damnation; and this
is to be considered a most consoling doctrine. And while men
may be born to hell-fire, they are instructed to love God with all
their hearts, and to forgive one another to the seventy times
Stimulated to selfishness by the idea of reward and
punishment, they are required to be unselfish, and urged to set
their hearts on high things. They are taught to believe that they
could not have existed as a consequence of Nature, and as Nature;
but that they were created by a Being resembling themselves, who
is at the same time incomprehensible ; that all nature is a fabric
made out of nothing; but that this wondrous Being—the first
cause, is himself without a cause or beginning. They are to
consider it necessary that man should have a maker, but that the
demand of causality is to rest there.”--Page 204.
seven.
230 The Natural History of Atheism.
15. “From the recognition of universal LAW, we shall develop
a universal LOVE. We shall see that no man can be a friend to us
who is not a friend to all. We shall learn that dirt is beauty
unformed, and that evil is undeveloped good.”—Page 209.
16. “Men sing to the praise and glory of God, seeing in Him
a jealous man, the wretched image of their own miserable selves.”
17. “ Though man cannot make the smallest worm or particle of
dust, he imagines a Creator or Cause to be the same vain, incom-
petent animal as himself.”—Page 227.
18. “ Fitness in Nature is no evidence of design. That the
lungs are fitted for breathing, and the eye for seeing, is no more
evidence of design than that the seal is fitted to the impression, or
that two halves make the whole.”—Page 228.
19. “He who does not suppose a personal God or Lord for a
future, may, nevertheless, be most unselfish and deeply religious-
so religious, that he shrinks from all the forms of worship, because
he sees in them all but forms of worship, and forms of fancy, and
not the spirit and the image of truth. There are thousands upon
thousands who have no clear knowledge on any one question rela-
ting to their religion, and yet are most proud in declaring them-
selves Christians, although it be not certain that they possess any
one Christian self-denying virtue.
“Were Christ to appear among such persons, he would not be
recognised ; nor would he recognise them as Christians. Saying,
“I am a Christian,' and crying, 'Lord ! Lord !' will not open the
gate of heaven to any man; and those who would jostle in before
their neighbours shall be the last to enter and the least in heaven,
-in the heaven of a truly virtuous and loving heart. I think a
man may be so religious as to be quite shocked with all notions of
prayer and all familiar intercourse with deity whatsoever. We
must pause in wonder before the great mystery of Nature, the
hidden truth and the cause, and learn that knowledge is power, and
knowledge is wisdom, and wisdom and power are in obedience;
for, by yielding to this law, the law is fulfilled, and the works are
accomplished. Christ lived and died for the good of mankind;
Socrates lived and died for the good of mankind; and so ought
The Atheism of Reaction.
231
20.
we all to live and die for the good of mankind; and only by
forgetting self shall we elevate and ennoble life. I would not ac-
cept of heaven if I thought that others were to go to hell.”.
Page 229.
“ Christian morals are considered perfect ; but they will re-
quire much weeding and developing before they can be accepted
by high and philosophic minds_by the best and most enlightened
minds of the present day. And is there no place for man's faith
when he has ceased the worship of idols? It is the idlest folly to
suppose that the idea of Necessity would let men loose among their
evil passions. But, that we require something to reverence and
elevate our thoughts towards, is true: knowledge gives us a more
elevated poetry, gives us the chart and laws of mind to guide us,
and will exhibit to us higher objects for reverence. Is it nothing
to have faith in Nature; to have faith in knowledge, and in good-
ness, which is the fruit of knowledge? Is it nothing to have faith
in love? Is it nothing to regard Nature in all her forms with pro-
found reverence ? to love truth and worship goodness, and find no
place for contempt of any living thing or condition of matter?
Trained in the knowledge of the laws of mind, to find it impossible
to take offence; what a soothing influence! What a blessing this
one circumstance! What a foundation for virtue and generosity !
and for peace of mind ! Is it nothing to cast away ambition ? to
desire excellence rather than to excel ? to feel a noble contentment
in reflecting that you are a part of Nature-a form of the eternal ?
Is there nothing in that faith which seeks for happiness out of self
in the happiness of others, and the glories of N ture-content that
in death the lease of personality shall pass away, and that you
shall be as you were before you were—in a sleep for evermore ?"
Page 230.
21. “I am far from being an atheist, as resting on second
As well might we, resting on this earth, deny that there
is any depth beneath, or, living in time, deny eternity. I do not
say, therefore, that there is no God: but that it is extravagant and
irreverent to imagine that cause a Person. All we know is phe-
nomena; and that the fundamental cause is wholly beyond our
conception. In this I do not suspend my judgment; but rather
causes.
232 The Natural History of Atheism.
assert plainly that of the motive power or principle of things we
know absolutely nothing, and can know nothing : that no form of
words could convey any knowledge of it; and that no form of
thought could imagine that which is wholly aside of Nature (as
Nature is to us), and of the nature of the mind, and, as it were,
behind the understanding. A cause of causes' is an unfathomable
mystery. Phenomena necessarily have a certain form and order
which we term lax. The most fundamental and general law is
what Bacon terms Forms. I cannot believe in a manufacturing
God, as implied in the idea of a Creator and a creation ; nor can I
believe in any beginning or end to the operations of Nature. The
cause in Nature or of Nature is eternal and immutable. The earth
and stars may pass away into other forms; but the law is eternal
--man, animals, plants, stones are consequently in Nature. The
mind of man, the instincts of animals, the sympathies (so to speak)
of plants, and the properties of stones, are results of material
development; that development itself being a result of the prop-
erties of matter, and the inherent cause or principle which is the
basis of matter. If to have this conception of things is to be an
atheist, then am I an atheist. If to renounce all idolatry, and
to repose upon the deep and solemn conviction of an eternal and
necessary cause_such a Cause as that, with our faculties, we could
not know, or, as it is expressed, 'could not
could not see and live '-if this
be atheism or materialism, be it so, I care not about terms."
Page 240.
"What is mind, but an evolved condition or form of the
powers of Nature, like light, heat, magnetism? What are the in-
stincts of animals and the mind of man but a result of chemical
action or material processes ?"_Page 257.
23. “ Perhaps in the end it may be seen that some of those
that are called Materialists are the most spiritual in their notions :
more spiritual, at least, than those who talk of gross materialism,
and at the same time invoke their material God, who sits upon a
throne ; who talk disparagingly of human affections, and human
wisdom, and poor human nature, and at the same time fashion
their God in their likeness."--Page 259.
22.
The Atheism of Reaction.
233
MISS MARTINEAU.
24. “When men are driven out of their grosser superstitions by
the evidence of LAW, which are everywhere around them, they
still cling to the baseless notion of a single conscious Being outside
of Nature, himself unaccounted for, and not himself accounting for
Nature."--Page 218.
25. "When we have finally dismissed all notion of subjection
to a superior lawless Will—all the perplexing notions about sin
and responsibility, and arbitrary reward and punishment—and
stand free to see where we are, and to study our own nature, and
recognise our own conditions—the relief is like that of coming
out of a cave full of painted shadows under the free sky, with
the earth open round about us to the horizon. What a new
perception we obtain of the beauty of holiness'--the loveliness
of a healthful moral condition-accordant with the laws of Nature,
and not with the requisitions of theology! What a sense of rever-
ence awakens in us when, dismissing the image of a Creator bring-
ing the universe out of nothing, we clearly perceive that the very
conception of origin is too great for us, and that deeper and
deeper down in the abysses of time, further and further away in
the vistas of the ages, all was still what we see it now-a system
of ever-working forces, producing forms uniform in certain lines and
largely various in the whole, and all under the operation of immu-
table Law !”– Page 219.
26. “I am convinced that the true moral life is found in going
out of ourselves.”—Page 222.
We have presented these extracts at consider-
able length from a conviction that no other method
could be so effectual in showing the emptiness,
absurdity, and self-contradictory nature of all ar-
guments that can be advanced in favour of the
monstrous doctrine of atheism. Part of the affair
234 The Natural History of Atheism.
is a mere logomachy arising from a strange use of
words; another part is an impatient recalcitration
against certain doctrines of the received theology
of the Christian Churches, or of the theology of
certain ignorant and foolish vain talkers in Chris-
tian pulpits and books of Christian devotion; a
third part is an exaggeration of the vices of Chris-
tians, and a glorification of the virtues of atheists;
and the rest of it is a conglomeration of misunder-
standings and cross-purposes which resists all
attempt at being brought within the pale of a
reasonable logic. Let us take it with all briefness
in detail.
REMARKS.
Nos. I, 2, 4, 5, 22. To bring any sense out of
these propositions we shall require a new defi-
nition of MATTER. If matter is made to include
motion, both secondary motions and that primary
source of all energy "in whom we live, and MOVE,
and have our being," then of course we may say with
all truth that everything in the world is only matter
influencing matter. But it would be equally true
to adopt Spinoza's language and to say that every-
thing in the world is only God influencing God.
But what sense is there in inverting the common
The Atheism of Reaction.
235
acceptation of known terms, and then tricking out
a philosophy from such perversion of language ?
It was in this way that Bentham got himself a cer-
tain temporary reputation as a moralist, by con-
founding the good with the pleasurable.* There
can be no speculative error, though unquestion-
ably a most uncalled-for amount of practical con-
fusion, in substituting the word MATTER for God,
provided we import into our idea of matter all
those transcendental virtues, energies, and func-
tions which the theist recognises as inherent in the
great First Cause. But why this juggle ? Far
more reasonable were it to deny the existence of
matter altogether, than to attribute to it qualities
plainly inconsistent with its fundamental concep-
tions.
When it is said that “the mind is the product
of the brain,” this is just as true as to say that the
horse is the product of the cart. No doubt brain
and thought are indissolubly bound together—as
we might conceive horse and cart to be—but as
both mind and brain are products of the inherent
self-energizing, self-plastic Mind of the universe,
* That Bentham's ethical system is utterly worthless, was after-
wards confessed by his principal disciple. See J. S. Mill's “ Essay
on Bentham.''
236 The Natural History of Atheism.
which we call God, it is quite unwarranted to call
the one the product of the other. They are both
products of God; or, if you dislike the word pro-
ducts, say manifestations, emanations, or evolu-
tions. Behind all such phrases God lies as neces-
sarily as the sun behind the radiance which he
sheds.
To the doctrine of EVOLUTION enunciated in
No. 5 there can be no objection, provided always
that we do not assert the absurdity that something
is evolved out of nothing, reason out of unreason,
order out of confusion, light out of darkness, fire
out of frost, or the positive in any shape out of
mere blind negations. In all such cases only
the most superficial will confound a historical
sequence, or an accidental priority, with a meta-
physical priority, or a Cause.
No. 3. The faults and follies of professing Chris-
tians have no more logically to do with Christi-
anity than the errors made by schoolboys in sum-
ming up an arithmetical column with the principles
of the science of number.
In No. 6 there is a confusion between the con-
ferring of rewards and acting for the sake of ob-
taining rewards. The interpolation of the selfish
motive of course corrupts the purity of the action;
The Atheism of Reaction.
237
but it is not therefore wrong to reward those who,
from unselfish regards, have sacrificed themselves
for the good of the community.
No. 7. Bacon is quite right when he tells us not
to mix up theology with science; but he would be
altogether wrong, if he were to tell us not to mix
ap theology with philosophy. Science works in a
narrow range, and has no function to meddle with
philosophical or theological questions at all. The
question of design is a philosophical question, and
the moment a scientific man either asserts it or
denies it, he walks out of his proper sphere, and
is, or attempts to be, a philosopher. As for Dr.
Paley, and his simile of the watch, no writer that I
know has been more grossly abused and made to
stand a more unreasonable test in the literal inter-
pretation of his words. Dr. Paley—the genius of
common-sense, as he has been well called-did not
say, and did not in the remotest degree mean to
insinuate, that the world is a watch, or a manufac-
ture in any shape. He merely said that as we see
and acknowledge design, plan, purpose, and cal-
culation in the machinery of a watch, so, unless
we are altogether ignorant and purposely perverse,
we must acknowledge design, plan, calculation,
purpose, in the structure of the human body, and
238 The Natural History of Atheism.
in other organisms of Nature; and this doctrine,
expounded more than two thousand years ago by
Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, and besung by
David, the noblest of the Hebrew lyrists, is so
strikingly and pervadingly true that no subtleties
and sophistries and wretched verbal juggleries of a
purely negative physical science can hope to over-
turn it. We do not require the atheists or agnos-
tics to tell us that Nature is a growth, not a manu-
facture; that God is not a mechanic, and so forth ;
we know this perfectly well—we happen to have
been taught, as Christians, that God is a Spirit,
and a spirit in whom we live, and move, and have
our being ; but a growth, to rise into any con-
gruous proportions, requires design, as well as a
box, or a house, or any piece of mechanical com-
pagination. “Man designs, Nature is,” says Mr.
Atkinson. This is an antithesis merely in words,
which to a thinking mind conveys no meaning.
The writer should have said, Man MAKES ; Nature
IS : though, indeed, in the proper sense, man does
not even make; he only uses what is. But
neither in the making, nor the using, nor the
being, is there the slightest reason for the exclu-
sion of design. Design belongs, and must belong,
to all the three ; otherwise every human workshop
The Atheism of Reaction.
239
would become a lumber-room of incoherent frag-
ments, and instead of a world everywhere full of
reasonable law, we should have a lawless chaos
and a maundering Bedlam. The prejudice against
design in the minds of a certain class of scientific
men arises from two causes--1. Because mere
science does not mount up into the region of final
causes, and therefore takes upon itself to deny
generally what, for its own special purposes, it
does not require ; 2. Because some foolish theolo-
gians have interpreted a design into certain parts
of the Divine workmanship, which a little knowl-
edge of the scheme of Nature proved to be alto-
gether inadequate; and 3. Because the design
which we admire in the scheme of Nature is part
of a plan comprehending a vast whole, not to be
interpreted by the hasty inspection of a part; and
those who expatiate largely on the final cause of
the part as if it were the whole, and look at this
part also only in the light of human convenience
and comfort, are justly chargeable with ignorance
and presumption. God certainly does not do all
that he does in this vast and complex universe
merely for your pleasure or mine ; nor because
you and I can make profitable application of any-
thing in the world does it logically follow that this
240 The Natural History of Atheism.
use was in every case an end, and not rather an
accident of their existence ; but unquestionably he
is a most blind person who does not see, and
a most ungracious person who does not acknowl-
edge, as Socrates says, that the gods have done a
very great deal to make human beings as comfort-
able as possible. As to what Mr. Atkinson says,
that fitness of parts does not prove design, be-
cause the fact that two halves make a whole may
not prove design; the answer is plain, that not
every adaptation or congruity proves design, but
only such a combination of diverse means to a
common end as is absolutely impossible to con-
ceive without the directing presence of that im-
perial Unity which we call Mind. Break a bridge
in two, and join the two halves together again.
You say this does not indicate design. But did
the bridge, as a skilful junction of stones, bars, or
boards to connect two banks of a river, put itself
together without design? or could even the two
halves of a bridge, or of any other body, have
fitted so exactly into a whole, if there had not
been a shaping and moulding power behind the
materials, to shape them into such a whole ? Let
us not therefore say, there is no téros, design, or
final cause in the works of God, while we admit
The Atheism of Reaction.
241
that no meanest work of man can be without it ;
but let the manifest truth rather be stated thus :
the designs of man are petty, partial, and dealing
only with supplied materials ; the design of God is
one, pervading, inherent, self-acting, unavoidable.
As thoughts are in the mind of a great poet,
always shaping themselves out by constructive
reason and intuitive design into organic imagina-
tive structures called poems, so the eternal ideas in
the Divine mind are always shaping themselves
forth by inherent, necessary, eternal, self-evolv-
ing, self-plastic Reason into those living poems of
the creative intellect which we call worlds. With
God every thought is a deed; and thoughts and
deeds together evolved in the miraculous chain
of vital continuity which we call growth are the
essence of that incomprehensible, reasonable
Source of all existence called GOD, which all pure
religion devoutly worships, all sober philosophy
piously acknowledges, and no subtle argumenta-
tion can explain away.
No. 8, 21. There is little here that a reasonable
theist would be disposed to deny. The declar-
ation “that God is the substance of Law, and the
origin of all things,” shows how difficult it was for
Mr. Atkinson or any sound-minded man to main-
II
242 The Natural History of Atheism.
tain consistently the unreasonable negatives of
pure atheism.
No. 9. Curiously and perversely enough, he
here corrects himself for having used the term
GOD, and thinks it safer to talk of a fundamen-
tal something beyond sense, and underlying all
change. One can see nothing here, but an un-
reasonable and superstitious horror, against the
use of a venerable name which has been sanc-
tioned by all the noblest religions and all the
loftiest philosophies that were assayed to give for-
mulated utterance to the most deeply-seated in-
stincts of human consciousness.
No. ΙΟ. .
The objection of modern devotees of
physical science to "a personal God," seems to
arise from their using the term person in the sense
of human person.
It is therefore identical with
the objection to an anthropomorphic God, which
from the days of Xenophanes downwards has been
found in the van of all objections to the popular
theology ; but modern objectors should bear in
mind that Christianity is not polytheism; and that
the use of anthropomorphic phrases, even by the
most spiritual Christian theologians on occasions,
arises from a necessity of the human imagination,
and does not in the least imply that the persons
The Atheism of Reaction.
243
using such phrases think of Jehovah as the Greeks
did of Jove. Scientific men are sometimes rather
prosaic, and may be excused if they mistake a
simile for a proposition ; but philosophers, or
persons propounding philosophical propositions,
should know better. As to the objection to the
term Creator, we have stated in a previous chapter
that the production of something out of nothing,
by a metaphysical causation is not taught formally
in any text of the Christian Scriptures.
No. 12. The favouritism and predestination al-
luded to here is a vulgar misunderstanding of the
Pauline doctrine of election, a doctrine which, as
we have already stated, was taught by the ancient
Stoics, and is founded on the soundest views of
the general course of Providence. The doctrine
of philosophical necessity is objectionable only
when it denies the limited liberty which we plainly
enjoy, or when it is stated, with the atheists, as a
blind necessity or chance, not a seeing necessity
of the living God.
No. 13. The extraordinary conception which
lies at the root of this passage is, that because
some Christians are selfish, therefore religion is
essentially selfish, and because Mr. Atkinson, Miss
Martineau, and other agnostics are benevolent
244 The Natural History of Atheism.
persons, therefore the only way to infect the world
with beneficence is to adopt the atheistical opin-
ions of those persons!
No. 14. This is a fair average specimen of those
oblique and perverse views of Christian ethics
which are so common in the mouths of the agnos-
tics. That they have received some provocation
from foolish advocates and inconsistent professors,
we have all along admitted ; but, surely men pro-
fessing to be wise above their fellows. should not
allow themselves to be led away by such hasty
generalisations, and to see things with such dis-
torted optics.
Nos. 15, 17. The word LAW is the last term
with those who disdain to use the name of GOD,
as the symbol of the underlying reasonable cause
of the grand order of the universe. But this word,
however fashionable, is utterly void of philosophi-
cal significance. A law is simply a regular method
of operation, and implies either an internal or an
external causal Force, whose constant and consist-
ent action produces that method of operation.
The motion of the piston in a steam-engine pro-
ceeds according to a law; but no sane man could
dream of substituting that expression of regu-
larity in the movement for the true cause of the
The Atheism of Reaction.
245
movement. The cause of the law in this case is
the nature of steam+the designing mind of James
Watt. So with everything else : the men on a
chess-board, the balls on a billiard-table, the
soldiers in an ordered battle, move according to a
law ; but to substitute that law for the cause of
these motions is unmeaning babble. The cause of
all motion is a motive force; and the cause of all
reasonable motion, or motion according to a law,
is a reasonable motive force. And in this way
the cause of the laws of Nature, which we are
called upon to substitute for God, is the supreme
designing Reason, or reasonable Force, which we
call God, plus the nature of the materials which
Divine Force uses in working the organism of the
universe.
No. 20. There is not the slightest reason to
deny that atheists and agnostics may lead most
virtuous and noble lives, and may have their own
special comfort from their own special creed. We
only object to the easy egotism by which all the
higher virtues are appropriated to the atheistic
creed, and denied to the theistic.
No. 24. Here we have that phantom of " a sin-
gle conscious Being, outside nature," which seems
to have driven the atheistic mind of these times
246 The Natural History of Atheism.
out of its proprieties. The conception of a Jupi-
ter sitting outside of the world, either on the top-
most peak of Olympus, is quite foreign both to
philosophical theism and to spiritual Christianity;
but, notwithstanding the plainest contradictions to
the contrary, the obliquity of these people will
rush off at the mere sound of an innocent imagin-
ative expression, right away into the black nega-
tions of Law and Necessity, and atheism, or at
least what they call an impersonal God. When
theists call God a person, they certainly do not do
so because they conceive him as a separate unit,
bounded by the narrow limits of human personal-
ity, but because they deem it most suitable to
describe the supreme cause of all nature by that
which is most noble in nature. We know nothing
higher in the visible world than personality ; and
nothing higher in the invisible than God. If by
an impersonal God is meant, only a God freed
from all limits of merely human personality, there
is no great harm in it; but the phrase is extremely
vague; and may mean something, or anything, or
nothing at all. We shall therefore, wisely, have
nothing to do with it.
do with it. It may fill up the
the yawning
vacuities of atheism, with some decency; other-
wise worthless.
The Atheism of Reaction.
247
I have given this full consideration to the reli-
gious and theological opinions of Mr. Atkinson, not
because I attribute, or have the slightest reason to
attribute, any peculiar authority to his utterances,
but because his words represent fairly enough that
oblique vision, and distorted portraiture of Chris-
tian doctrine and morals, which, seasoned up with
the favourite scientific phraseology of the hour, is
cooked up into so many shallow shapes of more or
less distinctly enunciated atheism. Of Miss Mar-
tineau specially, we have said nothing. Unques-
tionably she was a lady, not only of rare intellec-
tual gifts, but with a moral nature of the most
delicate sensibility ; theologically, however, she
was content to put herself before the world as the
mere reflective mirror of Mr. Atkinson, and must
stand or fall with him. We now turn to Professor
Tyndall, a scientific expositor of much higher pre-
tensions, and one from whose well-weighed words,
placed before the British Association at Belfast in
the year 1874, we may expect to gather with more
precision the real sentiments of the materialists
and agnostics of the present day. I have read his
celebrated address over several times, with great
care ; and I have now little doubt as to its real
significance and drift. It certainly does not an-
248 The Natural History of Atheism.
nounce an intellectual philosophy of nature; the
prominence which it gives to the doctrine of atoms,
and the favour shown to Democritus, Epicurus,
and Lucretius, as compared with Plato, Aristotle,
and Zeno, gives a decidedly atheistical or material-
istic hue to the introductory paragraphs; but on
the whole, the concluding sections and the general
tone of the remarks in the body of the address
incline me to conclude that the lecturer is a Pan-
theist, and who would have no objections to
worship the God of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, or
Goethe, if he felt any movement in his soul to-
wards worship at all. The concluding lines, in-
deed, from Wordsworth, which the learned gentle-
man has italicised, are distinctly Pantheistic,
“A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things”-
and one can hardly conceive a writer, sympathizing
with Wordsworth at all, and at the same time
dealing in the blank vacuities and barren negations
of pure atheism. I have already explained that
pantheism, so long as it asserts the unity of motion
and spirit and mind in a reasonably-ordered uni-
verse, is a perfectly legitimate form of theism, to
which not even orthodox Christianity, rightly un-
The Atheism of Reaction.
249
derstood, need have any serious objection. But
there is a mist and a confusion and a slippery
ambiguity about Professor Tyndall's phraseology
which prevents the impartial reader from extract-
ing all that joy from the final Wordsworthian
quotation that it might otherwise naturally create.
The very fact of placing Democritus, Epicurus,
and Lucretius formally above Plato and Aristotle
shows a want of something in the writer's philoso-
phy which no quotations borrowed from writers
of a more lofty school can supply. To reconcile
Democritus and Wordsworth as we know them is
impossible. I say as we know them, because we
know Democritus only from fragments; and it may
have been the case that the great father of the
atomic doctrine, like Thales and the other wise
pre-Socratic sages, had a Móryos, or Reason, in the
background, by the help of which his atoms might
shape themselves into a reasonable universe. But
as things now stand neither Epicurus, the exposit-
or of Democritus, nor Lucretius, nor the modern
scientific lecturer, makes any use of Hóryos, or Noüs,
or any intellectual potency in their construction of
the universe. It constructs itself by evolution,
natural selection, laws, and a few other fashionable
phrases, which, divorced from a self-existent,
Ir*
250 The Natural History of Atheism.
plastic Lóyos, or Reason, as we have already ex-
plained, to a thinking mind, have simply no
significance at all. Of one thing Professor Tyndall
seems wisely aware: if this sort of materialistic
and agnostic talk is to go on, we must change our
definition of the word MATTER; and, no doubt, if
it is made to include motion, and not only blind
motion, but reasoned motion, and motion accord-
ing to a law, we may then say that Matter so
gifted contains “the promise and potency of all
terrestrial life." But, as we said with reference to
Mr. Atkinson, why confound all reasonable discus-
sion by using words in an entirely novel and self-
contradictory sense ? If matter includes motion,
then matter + motion + form, the result of motion
in a reasonable world, = GOD; and why not deny
matter altogether, instead of elevating it into a
position which it cannot consistently maintain ?
But letting this pass, we observe further that
Professor Tyndall, no less than Mr. Atkinson, is
pursued by the phantom of an external, mechani-
cal, detached, and interfering God, of whose
existence no sane Christian theist ever dreamed.
Another man of straw against which he seems to
be fighting is “ a series of creative acts," as if it
were at all necessary for any theist to believe in
The Atheism of Reaction.
251
the existence of any such acts. Inasmuch as God
is everywhere present, he must be everywhere
and always energizing according to the necessity
of his own eternal reason; and there is not, nor
can there be conceived, any such thing as a want
of continuity in the indwelling plastic energy by
which he is constantly shaping forth the life of the
universe. And Evolution, of which the learned
lecturer also makes large discourse, is a doctrine
to which no Christian theologian can have the
slightest objection; unless, indeed, there be some
divines who, taking the first chapter of Genesis in
its literal signification-which only a prosaic person
of the lowest order would do-imagine that God
created the world by six verbal fiats, like the
strokes of a harlequin, one in each of six days, and
then retired from the scene, with nothing to do,
as I have heard it sometimes expressed in the pul-
pit, but to “contemplate his own Infinite perfec-
tions!" Having dispensed as much as possible
with the idea of a plastic MIND in the universe,
and having assigned the natural functions of such
plastic Mind to a newly baptized Matter, we are
not to be surprised if Professor Tyndall goes on to
magnify the famous shibboleth of the ingenious
physical speculator, Dr. Darwin, and to employ
252 The Natural History of Atheism.
"natural selection” to do the work which devout
thinkers like Copernicus and Kepler have agreed
with Moses, King David, and other prophets and
wise men, in ascribing to God. The beauty of
flowers, he tells us, is due to natural selection.
Will he be so good as tell us whether, when a se-
lection is made, it must not be made on some
principle, which both renders the act of selection
possible, and causes it to be made in a particular
way? If the selection is made in the fashion that
the stronger overwhelms and absorbs the weaker,
in this case it is plain that there must be a princi-
ple of strength in nature which forces its way over
weakness. To this doctrine no man of sense can
object. But in the same way, if the selection takes
place in the fashion that beauty prevails over ugli-
ness, it can only be because there is a principle of
beauty in nature that rejoices in its own propaga-
tion. Well, then, unquestionably there is such a
principle in nature, otherwise how could the world
everywhere be blooming and bursting with beauty,
or at least tending towards beauty in some shape
or other ? But what is this principle ? Professor
Tyndall, unless he gives up Democritus and Epi-
curus, cannot answer this. Plato can. Beauty is
the Hoyos, Nous, or Mind, of the cosmos, manifest-
The Atheism of Reaction.
253
ing itself in the delicately-shaped congruities of
visual form. Hence the beauty of ferns and other
leafy tracery. GOD IN ALL AND THROUGH
ALL AND FOR ALL, is the only formula that
can explain these things. Without God, evolu-
tion, continuity of nature, natural selection, con-
servation of energy, or whatever other phrases
happen to have currency for the hour, are mere
sound and smoke, and imaginations of science
falsely so called.
THE END.
A BOOK WORTH READING.
BLACKIE'S
FOUR PHASES OF MORALS:
SOCRATES, ARISTOTLE, CHRISTIANITY, AND
UTILITARIANISM.
BY
JOHN STUART BLACKIE, F.R.S. E.
PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BDINBURGH.
One volume, 12mo, $1.50.
SELECTING Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, and Utilitarianism as the
four great types, Prof. Blackie shows how the theories of the ancient schools
intersect the activities of every-day life, and where they fall short of meeting
the demands and necessities of the human soul. The volume is remarkably
clear and incisive in style, and vigorous and stimulating in thought.
CRITICAL NOTICES.
From the Boston Daily Advertiser,
The Professor succeeds in bringing out with great perspicacity the salient
and distinguishing features of the four most remarkable phases or schools of
moral science which have had and still have influence in determining the
speculative opinions and practical conduct of the present civilized peoples.
The style of these lectures is for the most part plain and always directed to
the thought.
From the Boston Watchman and Reflector.
We regard this book of Prof. Blackie's as containing by far the ablost vide
dication of the divinity of Christianity which the year has produced. In the
aide sweep of its thought it takes in all those principles which underlie the
various forms not only of ancient error but of modern unbelief. The spirit
of finest scholarship, of broadest charity, and of a reverent faith, pervades
the entire book.
Fron the New York Christian Advocate.
The author is eminently orthodox, both philosophically and theologically.
It is a thoughtful work, and must prove highly suggestive of thought
to all who may read it appreciatively.
From the New York Examiner and Chronicle.
His style is very readable, often beautiful, - at once adorning and illus
trating his themes by varied allusions to the best ancient and modern lit-
erature,
From the New York Evangelist.
The volume shows a large acquaintance with the subject, and is uniform]
alcar and often eloquent.
Sont post-paid upon receipt of price by
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, & CO.
743 & 745 Broadway, New York
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",
A Vade Mecum for Young Men and Students.
ON SELF-CULTURE ;
INTELLECTUAL, PHYSICAL, AND MORAL.
BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE,
PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, AND AUTHOR O)
FOUR PHASES OF MORALS," ETC.
One volume, 16mo, cloth, $1.00.
CRITICAL NOTICES.
From the New York Evening Post.
We cannot here particularize Professor Blackie's precepts. Everywhere
he teaches the desirableness of healthful action, of a buoyant outlooking
energy. He is always fresh, never flippant, never dull. There is not a
page which would not repay quotation.
The reader himself
must go to this little volume. It is full of excellent sense and fine sugges-
tion. The style is forcible, simple, and elegant; the thought clear and
scholarly; of the high moral quality of the book we have said enough.
From the Boston Transcript.
Prof. Blackie's little book is so full of strong Scotch common-sense and
of judicious counsel in regard to the aims, studies, and habits of young
men, that it ought to find its way to the library, and to the head and heart
of every young man -- and young woman too- in all English-speaking
countries.
Froni the Congregatioualist.
To speak moderately, Self-Culture is positively admirable.
From the New York World.
As a whole, the book is a plain and forcible statement of rather obvious
truths, and it will doubtless prove of more practical service than the reader
who does not himself stand in need of its aid will be at first sight disposed
to think.
Fronz the Churchman.
The volume is one wnich every young man ought to read. It sets forth
in a way which no recent writer has equalled, the relations between intel-
lectual, physical, and moral culture, and will truly serve as a most valuable
vade miecuin.
From the Watchman and Reflector.
This last volume from Prof. Blackie's pen, bears the marks of the same
fertile thought, finished scholarship, large, earnest spirit, and strong, vigor-
ous literary style. The book was written especially for young men, and
every line is like a bugle call to all that is truly manly in the young nature.
From the Christian Intelligencer.
Full of sensible counsel and wise suggestions for young men, especially
chose preparing for or entering upon literary or professional pursuits, on
the subjects of the culture of the intellect, physical culture, and moral cul.
Gure. The wisdom of Prof. Blackie's counsels consists in their common
Kense and practicalness, and also in their condensed brevity.
Will be sent post-paid on receipt of the price by the publishers,
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, & CO.,
743 & 745 Broadway, New York
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