HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION 307 



cause it is what is most denied. As their own belief ebbs away from 

 them, they are precluded from learning a new one, because they are 

 too deeply pledged, have promised too much, asseverated too much, 

 and involved too many others with themselves. Thus their language 

 becomes more and more vehement and hollow, more and more despair- 

 ing under the mask of triumphant confidence. It may happen that 

 the cause they defend is not merely unsound, but terribly bad, that 

 what they have taken for sacred institutions are in reality monstrous 

 abuses. Then, as they become reluctantly enlightened, as their advo- 

 cacy grows first a little forced, then by degrees consciously hypocriti- 

 cal, until in the end their eyes are fully opened not only to the fact 

 that their cause is bad, but, to all the enormous badness of it, there 

 follows a complete moral dissolution of the whole man. Unable to 

 abandon a position he is bound to, forced to act belief and enthusiasm 

 when under the mask there is the very opposite of both settled dis- 

 belief and utter disapproval the man sees now in the universe noth- 

 ing but a chaos. At the beginning he had a God ; his actions were 

 regulated by a law which he recognized in the universe; but now he 

 recognizes this law no more, and yet is forbidden by his situation from 

 recognizing any other. The link that bound him to the universe is 

 snapped; the motive that inspired his actions is gone, and his actions 

 have become meaningless, mechanical, galvanic. He is an atheist, a 

 man without a God because without a law. Such men may generally 

 be noted among the most intelligent adherents of expiring causes, 

 demoralized soldiers, powerless for good and capable of any mischief. 



These are specimens of what seems to me to be properly called athe- 

 ism. The common characteristic of all these states of mind is feeble- 

 ness. In the first example you have violent feebleness, impotence ; in 

 the second, cautious feebleness ; in the thii-d, cynical feebleness; but in 

 all cases feebleness springing from a conscious want of any clew to the 

 order of the universe. The specimens I have selected are all such as 

 may be furnished by men of great natural vigor. The cynical atheist 

 has often an extreme subtilty of intellect, the Philistine commonly be- 

 gins with a great grasp of reality, a great superiority to illusions ; the 

 willful atheist.has often much imagination and energy. Where a char- 

 acter wanting in energy is infected by atheism, you have those anevrjva 

 Kciprjva of which the world is at all times full. By the side of the 

 profound cynic you have the mere lounger, who can take an interest 

 in nothing, all whose thoughts are hearsays, never verified, never real- 

 ized, not believed, not worthy of the name of prejudices echoes of 

 prejudices, imitations of hypocrisy. He moves about embarrassed and 

 paralyzed by the hollowness of all he knows ; conscious that nothing 

 that he has in his mind would bear the smallest criticism or probation, 

 knowing no way to any thing better, and meanwhile ingenuously con- 

 fessing his own inanity. By the side of the over-judicious Philistine, 

 who has fallen into feebleness through an excessive dread of general- 



