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40. The importance of this principle in reference to the 
philosophy of Pantheism and Atheism is strikingly brought 
before us in the celebrated work of Strauss, entitled The Old 
Faith and the New , in which he professes not simply to state 
his own opinions, but to be acting as the mouthpiece of a large 
number of German unbelievers. As this work has already gone 
through more than one edition in our language, besides the 
large number that it had previously gone through in Germany, 
it will be necessary to give it a special attention, for the purpose 
of exposing the unsound basis of its philosophy. The questions 
discussed in it are such that it is impossible to exaggerate their 
importance. They are as follows : In answer to the question, 
Are we still Christians? in the name of advanced thought in 
Germany, he answers in the negative. In reply to the question. 
Have we a religion ? the answer is of a similar import. In 
answer to the question, What is our conception of the universe ? 
his reply assumes the form of a material Pantheism, which 
differs in nothing from Atheism except in an illicit use of the 
language of Theism. Lastly, wonderful to say, in answer to 
the question, What is our rule of life ? he announces himself 
a thorough-going German conservative, and utters a loud 
protest against the various forms of Communistic Atheism. It 
would appear that he and those in whose name he speaks are of 
opinion that the only effective mode to bar out the ocean is to 
demolish the old strongly-built sea-wall to its foundations, 
which has for ages past successfully repelled its billows, and in 
future to attempt to dam them out by substituting for it a thin 
layer of sand. 
41. The faith into which the author’s philosophy has con- 
ducted him, and those in whose name he speaks, is that of the 
existence of a Cosmos, the sum total of all being, material, 
mental, and moral, including all existence and its laws, but 
which is void of personality, which is deaf to the voice of prayer ; 
in which the place of volition is supplied by necessary and 
unyielding laws ; of an intelligent Creator, by a self-developing 
power utterly unconscious, which to man is incapable of being 
the object of either hope or trust; which in the course of its 
self-development has evolved both the individual and the race, 
and will crush them again beneath the heel of iron destiny. This 
power will, through the endless whirl of the eternities of time 
and the infinities of space, go on evolving fresh worlds out of the 
ashes of preceding ones, and endless successions of systems and 
of galaxies, in which we as individuals shall take no part, to be 
again absorbed into the bosom of the mighty infinite. At death 
our self-conscious existence shall perish, never to be renewed. 
The atoms which compose us, after having been absorbed into 
