A work has recently appeared which purports to be a natural history of atheism.[[103]] Its author is an accomplished Protestant scholar, a learned professor, an elegant writer, and an earnest advocate of religious ideas in accordance with the Bible as interpreted by his private judgment. His object is to refute atheism. Of course history, reason, and revelation are all on his side, so he is well armed; whilst his antagonist, though boisterous and aggressive, is by no means formidable, having had his strength thoroughly broken by former defeats. In such a condition of things the victory should evidently belong to the champion of Divinity. And yet no. Our champion strikes, indeed, some heavy blows, but while thus struggling with the enemy he falls into a quagmire. In other words, he grapples with a senseless atheism only to plunge into an equally senseless pantheism.
With regard to the first chapters of the work we have little to say. The author proves pretty conclusively that atheism is against reason. He shows that the belief in the existence of God has been universal not only among civilized nations but also among barbarous tribes. “Atheism,” says he, “is a disease of the speculative faculty.” “It indicates a chaotic state of mind.” “It is a doctrine so averse from the general current of human sentiment that the unsophisticated mass of mankind instinctively turn away from it, as the other foxes did from that vulpine brother who, having lost his tail in a trap, tried to convince the whole world of foxes that the bushy appendage in the posterior region was a deformity of which all high-minded members of the vulpine aristocracy should get rid as soon as possible.” This argument against atheism was well known to the ancients, who laid great stress upon it, as they saw that a universal agreement of mankind on the existence of God could not but proceed from our rational nature; but our author considers it as a simple “presumption,” rather than a proof in favor of the theistic doctrine.
He then argues from the principle of causality and from the wonderful wisdom displayed in the architecture of the universe. This, too, is very good. Next, he meets the objection drawn from the existence of evil in the world.
“If there were no poverty,” says he, “where were charity? If every person were equally independent and self-reliant, where would be the gracious pleasure on both sides which arises from the support given by the strong to the weak? Where again would be the topping virtue of moral courage, unless the majority, at some particular critical moment, were cowards?... In fact, always and everywhere the development of energy implies the existence of that which energy must subdue—namely, evil in some shape or other. Therefore the existence of evil is not a proof that there is no God; but it is by the overcoming of evil constantly that God proves himself to be God, and man proves himself to be God-like, when in his subordinate sphere he does the same.”
This answer is tolerably good; but we doubt if the atheist will be silenced by it. The author should have distinguished physical from moral evil. The existence of physical evil he could have shown to be perfectly reconcilable with God’s infinite goodness and providence; whereas the existence of moral evil should have been shown to be in no manner derogatory to his infinite sanctity. This has been done very fully by a multitude of philosophers and theologians; but it could not be done consistently by our pantheistic writer, because, as we shall see, all moral evil, according to his pantheistic theory, would either emanate from God or be immanent in him, with a total ruin of his infinite sanctity. Hence the atheist, after all the reasonings of the learned professor, may still urge that the existence of a God is incompatible with the existence of sin; and we think that the professor will be at a loss how to answer the difficulty so long as he holds to his pantheistic views.
As to the genesis of atheism the author makes many good and thoughtful remarks. There is a sort of atheism which arises from an absolute feebleness or babyhood of intellect. This he calls “atheism of imbecility”; but, says he, “we need not detain ourselves with this type of intellectual incapability. It is not atheists of this class that we are likely to meet with in the present age; and if we did meet them we should be much more likely to remit them summarily to some hospital of incurables than to a thinking school.”
The next type of the atheistic disease has its origin in moral depravity. There are men whose career is “like a piece of music made up of a constant succession of jars, which shakes the strings so much by unkindly vibrations that the instrument, from the force of an unnatural strain, cracks itself into silence prematurely. Now, unharmonized characters of this description are naturally indisposed, and practically incapacitated from recognizing order, design, and system in the constitution of the universe, and of course cannot see God.” This root of atheism is very well illustrated by Mr. Blackie. Here is a beautiful passage:
“It occurs to me to set down here the features of one of the most notable of those disorderly characters who lived in ancient Rome at the same epoch when the hollow atheism of Epicurus was dressed up for a day in the garb of poetical beauty by a poet of no mean genius called Lucretius. The man I mean is Catiline. Hear how Sallust in a well-known passage describes him: ‘Lucius Catiline, born of a noble family, a man of great strength, both of mind and body, but of a wicked and perverse disposition. To this man, from his youth upwards, intestine broils, slaughters, rapines, and civil wars were a delight; and in these he put forth all the energy of his youth. He could boast of a bodily frame capable of enduring heat and cold, hunger and watching, beyond all belief; he had a spirit daring, cunning, and full of shifts, ready alike to simulate what he was not and to dissimulate what he was, as occasion might call. Greedy of others’ property, he was lavish of his own; in passion fiery, in words copious, in wisdom scant. His unchastened ambition was constantly desiring things immoderate, incredible, and beyond human reach.’ This is exactly the sort of character, to whose completeness if anything like a philosophy is to be attributed, atheism will be that thing.”
In our age, however, according to the author, all the varieties of speculative and practical atheism which we meet with in common life are “weeds sprung from the rank soil of irreverence.” Man being naturally a religious animal, atheism can then only spring up when, in the individual or in society, any influence arises which nips the natural bud of reverence in the soul. Thus power may foster a strong feeling of independence, which may end in a monstrous self-worship. But liberty also, as the author well remarks, when unlimited, leads to godlessness. There is an atheism of democracy no less than of despotism. From extreme democracy, as from a hot-bed, atheism in its rankest stage naturally shoots up. There is nothing in the idea of mere liberty to create the feeling of reverence. The desire of unlimited liberty is an essentially selfish feeling, and has no regard for any Power from above. The fundamental maxim of all pure democracy is simply this: “I am as good as you, and perhaps a little better; I acknowledge nobody as my master, whether in heaven above or on earth beneath; I will not be fettered.”
But, continues the author, unlimited power and unlimited liberty are not the only social forces that are apt to run riot in the exaggerated assertion of the individual and the negation of all superhuman authority. There is the irreverence begotten of pride of intellect. Knowledge, of course, does not directly produce irreligion or extinguish piety, on the contrary, the more a wise man knows of the universe, the more he is lost in admiration of its excellence. But the knowing faculty is not the whole of a living man, and to bring forth its healthy fruits it must go hand-in-hand with a rich moral nature; divorced from this, knowledge begets intellectual pride and opens the way to godlessness.