THE RECONCILIATION. 113 



certain denned manner. Shall we call this reverence? or 

 shall we call it the reverse? 



Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the 

 pious. Through the printed and spoken thoughts of relig- 

 ious teachers, may almost everywhere be traced a professed 

 familiarity with the ultimate mystery of things, which, to 

 say the least of it, seems anything but congruous with the 

 accompanying expressions of humility. And surprisingly 

 enough, those tenets which most clearly display this famil- 

 iarity, are those insisted upon as forming the vital elements 

 of religious belief. The attitude thus assumed, can be fitly 

 represented only by further developing a simile long current 

 in theological controversies — the simile of the watch. If 

 for a moment we made the grotesque supposition that the 

 tickings and other movements of a watch constituted a kind 

 of consciousness; and that a watch possessed of such a con- 

 sciousness, insisted on regarding the watchmaker's actions 

 as determined like its own by springs and escapements; 

 we should simply complete a parallel of which religious 

 teachers think much. And were we to suppose that a watch 

 not only formulated the cause of its existence in these 

 mechanical terms, but held that watches were bound out of 

 reverence so to formulate this cause, and even vituperated, 

 as atheistic watches, any that did not venture so to formulate 

 it ; we should merely illustrate the presumption of theologi- 

 ans by carrying their own argument a step further. A 

 few extracts will bring home to the reader the justice of this 

 comparison. We are told, for example, by one of high 

 repute among religious thinkers, that the Universe is " the 

 manifestation and abode of a Free Mind, like our own ; em- 

 bodying His personal thought in its adjustments, realizing 

 His own ideal in its phenomena, just as we express our inner 

 faculty and character through the natural language of an 

 external life. In this view, we interpret Nature by Human- 

 ity; we find the key to her aspects in such purposes and 

 affections as our own consciousness enables us to conceive; 



