HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 303 



only a distinction between two kinds of theists. This is what in com- 

 mon controversy it actually is. One might suppose beforehand that 

 the theist and atheist must necessarily have the whole diameter be- 

 tween them, that their thoughts upon all subjects must be affected by 

 this fundamental difference. It is not so in fact ; the theist and the 

 so-called atheist often indeed differ very widely, but sometimes also 

 they think very much alike. This is, in reality, because one or other 

 has been misnamed, for, between a real and thoroughly convinced 

 theist and an atheist really deserving that name, there is almost 

 as much difference as we could expect ; only the latter character is not 

 very easy to meet with. 



An atheist in the proper sense of the word is not a man who dis- 

 believes in the goodness of God, or in his distinctness from Nature, or 

 in his personality. These disbeliefs may be as serious in their way as 

 atheism, but they are different. Atheism is a disbelief in the existence 

 of God that is, a disbelief in any regularity in the universe to which 

 a man must conform himself under penalties. Such a disbelief, as I 

 have said, is speculatively monstrous, but it may exist practically, and 

 where it does is an evil as fatal to character and virtue as the most 

 timid religionist supposes. We may consider here, briefly, some of 

 the forms which atheism assumes. 



The purest form of atheism might be called by the general name 

 of xoillf Illness. All human activity is a transaction with Nature. It 

 is the arrangement of a compromise between what we want on the one 

 hand and what Nature has decreed on the other. Something of our 

 own wishes we have almost always to give up ; but by carefully con- 

 sidering the power outside ourselves, the necessity that conditions all 

 our actions, we may make better terms than we could otherwise, and 

 reduce to a minimum what we are obliged to renounce. Now we may 

 either underrate or overrate the force of our own wills. The first is 

 the extravagance of theism; it is that fatalism which steals so natu- 

 rally upon those who have dwelt much upon the thought of God, which 

 is said to paralyze, for example, the whole soul of the Mussulman. 

 But the opposite mistake is a deficiency of theism ; a touch of it often 

 marks the hero, but the fullness of it is that kind of blind infatuation 

 which poets have represented under the image of the giants that tried 

 to storm heaven. Not to recognize any thing but your own will, to 

 fancy every thing within your reach if you only will strongly enough, 

 to acknowledge no superior power outside yourself which must be 

 considered and in some way propitiated if you would succeed in any 

 undertaking this is complete willfulness, or, in other words, pure 

 atheism. It may also be called childishness, for the child naturally 

 discovers the force within it sooner than the resisting necessity outside. 

 Not without a few falls in the wrestle with Nature do we learn the 

 limits of our own power and the pitiless immensity of the power that 

 is not ours. But there are many who cannot learn this lesson even 



