TRUE LESSON OF PROTESTANTISM 



vie with the ancient Gnostics in heaping abuse 

 upon poor blind, brute, senseless, inert " mat- 

 ter." But Priestley was by no means a material- 

 ist in the sense in which that word is correctly 

 used in philosophic discussion to-day. It is not 

 merely in the vocabulary of theological abuse 

 that the terms materialism and atheism are 

 closely associated ; the opinions which they con- 

 note are really linked together in many ways. 

 In former times it was customary to stigmatize 

 the colossal generalizations of astronomers and 

 geologists as " atheistical," because they sub- 

 stituted divine action through natural law for 

 divine action through supernatural fiat, which 

 had hitherto been commonly regarded as the 

 only conceivable kind of divine action. Nowa- 

 days as cultivated minds are beginning to sur- 

 mount this old difficulty, the bugbear springs 

 up in a new quarter. Now that we have begun 

 to study psychology after a scientific method, 

 and to derive valuable assistance from the in- 

 vestigation of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres, and 

 now that we have begun to apply to these 

 studies the profoundest generalizations of phys- 

 ics and chemistry concerning the behaviour of 

 molecules of matter, we hear so much talk about 

 undulations and discharges and nervous con- 

 nections that many worthy people seem to be 

 afraid of seeing it proved that we have really no 

 psychical life at all. They are afraid that the 

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