3o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it is made to be constantly assimilating such sustenance from the uni- 

 verse; this is its food: not by bread only, hut by every word that pro- 

 ceedeth out of the mouth of God, doth man live. What, then, must be 

 the moral starvation of the man who, from an excess of caution, turns 

 away from every thing of the kind, until from want of habit he can 

 no longer see such tilings, and forgets their very existence ; so that 

 for him there is no longer any glory in the universe ! For all beauty 

 or glory is but the presence of law ; and the universe to him has ceased 

 to be a scene of law, and has become an infinite litter of detail, a rub- 

 bish-lieap of confused particulars, a mere worry and weariness to the 

 imagination. I have been describing the Philistine, the miserable 

 slave of details, who worships a humiliated, dissected and abject deity, 

 a mere Dagon, "fallen flat upon the grundsel-edge, and shaming his 

 worshipers." 



There is a particular form of conventionalism which all men who 

 see it instinctively call by the name of atheism. By conventionalism 

 generally, I understand the mistaking of institutions, usages, forms 

 of society, which essentially are temporary and transitory, for normal 

 and permanent forms. It is conventionalism, for example, when he- 

 reditary royalty or aristocracy are supposed to be not merely good 

 institutions in particular cases but necessary in all countries and times. 

 There is nothing at all atheistic in such a mistake ; it is rather a super- 

 stition that is, it is a false belief, but still a belief. The temporary 

 arrangements are honestly confused with eternal laws, the feelings and 

 views which in course of time have grown up around them are hon- 

 estly mistaken for essential morality. The devoted adherents of the 

 exiled Stuarts and Bourbons, the early Jesuits and the other champi- 

 ons of the counter-reformation, seem to me to have been such conven- 

 tionalists. I think they confounded a transitory state of things with 

 the sacred and eternal laws of human society. But for a long time 

 their faith was genuine though mistaken. They had a God, and there- 

 fore they had vigor, and occasionally victory. But at the same time 

 their belief was an ebbing tide. The movement of the age was, on 

 the whole, against it ; their successes always bore the marks of being 

 accidental, and were followed in no long time by more than equiva- 

 lent reverses. They could never give a character of reality to what 

 they created; they could seldom feel quite easy and happy in their 

 party strife. Their eloquence was copious and sonorous, but not often 

 quite natural, and seldom convincing or overwhelming. And with 

 such conventionalists, when the age puts them on their defense, these 

 misgivings, this uneasiness, this constraint and depression go on in- 

 creasing. Doubt penetrates them in spite of all their resistance, in 

 spite of all the chivalrous devotion to their cause upon which they 

 pride themselves. In the ardor of conflict they have pushed into the 

 foreground all the weakest parts of their creed, and have got into the 

 habit of asserting most vehemently just what they doubt most, be- 



