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And although Zeus replies that he would prefer one sensible man to a thousand fools, when a case depends upon the adherence of the relatively foolish, numbers will always bring some consolation to the champions of an intellectually distressed creed. Between Atheism and Theism there is no logical halting place. But there are, unfortunately, many illogical ones.
Their error is, that they make them the proper and underived attributes of the world. It follows then, that Pantheism is equivalent to Atheism, and that there is no other Atheism actually existing, or speculatively conceivable, but Pantheism.
At first, the public, and particularly its religious portion, denounced the rising doubts as atheism. They despoiled some of the offenders of their goods, exiled others; some they put to death. They asserted that what had been believed by pious men in the old times, and had stood the test of ages, must necessarily be true.
I mention it partly because many preferred this man to Faber on the ground that he went to church every Sunday, and always shook his head at the other's atheism.
Atheism teaches man to endeavor constantly to better his own condition and that of all of his fellowmen, to make his children wiser and happier; it supplies the powerful urge to add something new to the knowledge of mankind. And all this, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells.
The "little philosophy" which "inclineth a man's mind to atheism," led the eighteenth century philosophers to fancy that Newton's discoveries meant that everything could be attained without religion, and that the only true and wide vision could be reached by the senses alone.
Certainly, this is one aspect of a certain kind of Atheism the Atheism of the man who reveres beauty to such an extent that his own ugliness, which outrages him, must be concealed from every eye lest it should not be respected as Zarathustra respected it. If there be a God, He too must be evaded. His pity must be foiled. But God is ubiquitous and omniscient.
The factions, he added with fierce sarcasm, 'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition.
To deny such a right, would be a kind of atheism against nature: and the best answer to such an objection would be, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." II. The interest of the continent in being independent is a point as clearly right as the former.
But I have had time to guess their secret ejaculations: "I am studying the Origin of Trade Guilds!" "I, the Reign of Louis the Twelfth!" "I, the Latin Dialects!" "I, the Civil Status of Women under Tiberius!" "I am elaborating a new translation of Horace!" "I am fulminating a seventh article, for the Gazette of Atheism and Anarchy, on the Russian Serfs!"
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