Bravo! Freedom, personality, and responsibility are facts. The pantheistic theory contradicts them, but cannot interfere with them any more than with generation, appetite, and digestion. Hence when any one argues from the pantheistic theory against freedom, personality, and responsibility, he must be answered with “a fact and a flogging.” And, vice versa, if any one from freedom, personality, and responsibility argues against the pantheistic theory which makes these things inexplicable and impossible, he, too, must be answered with “a fact and a flogging.” Does the reader understand the excellence of this liberalistic logic? Yes, with a fact and a flogging; for the eloquence of the scourge sometimes replaces with advantage the doubtful efforts of a hesitating tongue: Si non prosunt verba, prederunt verbera. What a candid confession of pantheistic impotence! But then, if flogging is to be resorted to, who shall be found more worthy of it than the pantheist himself, who wantonly contradicts by his theory what his common sense recognizes to be a fact?
The book we have thus far examined contains many other errors on important points of religion; but our readers need not be detained any longer in their refutation. The author admits a general providence, but a providence which imparts particular favors in reward of prayer he does not admit. Answers to prayers he considers to be “as ridiculous as interpretations of judgments are presumptuous.” For him “the idea of a God, constantly interfering in answer to prayer, or otherwise, is one of the most anthropomorphic of theological conceptions.” “Asceticism and monkery form a very sad and lamentable chapter in the history of the church.” Abstinence and mortification are “a pedantic and ridiculous sort of virtue,” and they are “abnormal, monstrous, inhuman, and absurd.” Then “there is, and can be, no such thing as a priesthood in Christianity.” It would take too long to enumerate all his theological, philosophical, and historical blunders, for his book is full of them; so we must give up the task.
In the last pages of the work we find a fairly good refutation of atheism, as maintained by Miss Martineau, Mr. Atkinson, and Prof. Tyndall. But what is the use of such a refutation, if it is intended merely as a first step towards pantheism? A pantheist has no right to refute atheism. Whatever he may say against it can always, in one manner or another, be retorted against himself; and when the retorsion is pushed on to its last consequences, his defeat takes the aspect of an atheistic victory. Thus nothing is gained, and discussions become interminable, to the great satisfaction of the sceptics. It is for this reason that most of the Protestant controversies on religious topics cannot be settled. Truth, if mixed with error, has little, if any, chance of victory; and books in which truth is compelled to minister to error are all the more pernicious because their poison is less recognizable. If this Natural History of Atheism is what we assume it to be—a Masonic work—then we must confess that the Scottish Masons could not be served better than by such a baneful mixture of Calvinistic dogmatism and pantheistic dreams.
THE CREATED WISDOM.[[106]]
BY AUBREY DE VERE.
I.
Created Wisdom at the gate
Of Heaven, ere Time began, I played;
The Eternal Wisdom Uncreate
Beheld me ere the worlds were made.
I danced the void abyss above:
Of lore unwrit the characters