620 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
room in many minds. Possibly, the people who hold such 
views might be able to illustrate them by individual 
instances. 
The fear of bell's a hangman's whip, 
To keep the wretch in order. 
Remove the fear, and the wretch, following his natural 
instinct, may become disorderly; but I refuse to accept 
him as a sample of humanity. " Let us eat and drink, 
for to-morrow we die" is by no means the ethical conse- 
quence of a rejection of dogma. To many of you the name 
of George Jacob Holyoake is doubtless familiar, and you 
are probably aware that at no man in England has the 
term "atheist" been more frequently pelted. There are, 
moreover, really few who have more completely liberated 
themselves from theologic notions. Among working-class 
politicians Mr. Holyoake is a leader. Does he exhort his 
followers to " Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?" Not 
so. In the August number of the Nineteenth Century 
you will find these words from his pen: " The gospel of 
dirt is bad enough, but the gospel of mere material com- 
fort is much worse." He contemptuously calls the Comtist 
championship of the workingman, "the championship of 
the trencher." He would place " the leanest liberty which 
brought with it the dignity and power of self-help" higher 
than "any prospect of a full plate without it." Such is 
the moral doctrine taught by this "atheistic" leader; and 
no Christian, -I apprehend, need be ashamed of it. 
Most heartily do I recognize and admire the spiritual 
radiance, if I may use the term, shed by religion on the 
minds and lives of many personally known to me. At the 
same time f cannot but observe how signally, as regards 
the production of anything beautiful, religion fails in other 
cases. ' Its professor and defender is sometimes at bottom 
a brawler and a clown. These differences depend upon 
primary distinctions of character which religion does not 
remove. It may comfort some to know that there are 
among us many whom the gladiators of the pulpit would 
call "atheists" and "materialists," whose lives, neverthe- 
less, as tested by any accessible standard of morality, would 
contrast more than favorably with the lives of those who 
seek to stamp them with this offensive brand. When I 
say "offensive," I refer simply to the intention of those 
who use such terms, and not because atheism or material- 
