guided by no intellectual folly. Once admit a Personal Crea- 
ting God, and you admit the possibility, nay, the probability, 
of a revelation ; the being of the Supernatural ; the possi- 
ble existence of a higher Law which may overrule that 
which we are able to discover ; and that inferiority and 
imperfection of humanity which Aristotle could lay down as 
an axiom for a reduct io ad absurdum, el pb to apicrrov tCov tv 
Tuj ko o[i({> b uvOpwTTug tcrriv. But the Atheist is not troubled 
with any of these. The argument from design, which touches 
a mind that admits the vaguest Theism, has no force for him. 
For him soul and spirit, providence and adoration, Omnipo- 
tence and Omniscience, are only unmeaning terms foisted into 
language by debasing superstition, and nothing is true save 
that misty ring of unceasing self-evolution, which, — like the 
circling storm-clouds that, as astronomers tell us, are whirled 
by giant winds round the body of Jupiter, — is swept on through 
space by an all-controlling Fate. 
As a natural consequence, the sceptic of the present day 
ignores Christianity. He takes for granted that it is now 
given up. He quietly assumes that every mind worthy of the 
name must long ago have surrendered the last lingering relics 
of that exploded delusion. He simply blots out of his book of 
history the grand tale of the Christian Church, or, if he permits 
it to remain, treats it only as a melancholy obstacle which 
perverse ignorance allowed for a time to obstruct the pathway 
of human development. To any one who ventures to talk to 
him of Scripture, or of the teaching and example of the 
Founder of Christianity, he replies with a quiet smile of 
mingled pity and contempt, as who should say, "All that has 
been long ago discussed and done away with. Every thinker 
knows now that the Bible is a late and not very clever forgery, 
and marvels how men could so long have tolerated a book 
which, though its writers here and there show some poetic 
genius, and even approach a simple sublimity, is defaced and 
defiled by those patches of human passion and error which 
form a dark crust upon its surface.” Do we allege the pui’e 
morality of the Old and New Testament, he partly denies it, 
partly considers it taken from Confucius, Manu, and Socrates. 
Is a not unlikely coincidence of sentiments and expression 
found between passages of the New Testament and others in 
a treatise of the Talmud, or a Sura of the Koran, it only shows 
to him that the Christian forgery must be dated later than 
A.D. 500 or A.D. 622. In short, as I have said, Ave are con- 
fronted in the present day not by doubting Theists, but by 
Atheists, Avho meet us Avith a foregone conclusion, obstinately 
and scornfully upheld, against the doctrines which ive maintain. 
