46 The Cause of Life and Motion 



and of all manner of abominations ; and we may 

 trace all these hideous things to the more than 

 brutal selfishness of a certain class of men, who 

 have no souls and who live but to make a hell 

 upon earth, imperfect men who live for the 

 gratification of their bodies and whose earthy 

 minds must die and rot with their earthy bodies. 

 But they do not die by the curse of God; their 

 life is merely an early stage of progression in 

 the refinement of gross matter, and they die be- 

 cause their constituent elements are too coarse 

 to be sustained in action. 



The Atheist and the Bible. 



Whatever may be said to the contrary, it is 

 extremely doubtful whether a man who gives 

 the lie to his own existence by disavowing his 

 God, can safely be trusted. Such a man can 

 have no hold on himself. Yet these men do 

 good; they often show us incongruities in conven- 

 tional doctrines, and it is in these incongruities 

 they find an apology for becoming atheists. An 

 atheist stands as a dark cloud between the light 

 of Truth and its imperfect semblance ; he looks 

 only toward the semblance upon which his dread 

 shadow is cast, and he can only see the darkness 

 which he is the cause of. But in the very 



