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The theist, however, will not fail to tell the atheist, as he calls him, that these systems are not such as superstition paints them; that the colours are coarse, too glaring, ill assorted, the perspective out of all keeping; he will then exhibit his own picture, in which the tints are certainly blended with more mellowness, the colouring of a more pleasing hue, the whole more harmonious, but the distances equally indistinct: the atheist, in reply, will say, that superstition itself, with all the absurd prejudices, all the mischievous notions to which it gives birth, are only corollaries drawn from the fallacious ideas, from those obscure principles, which the deicolist himself indulges.
For, after all, what the theist needs is, not an eternal energy, but a personality. An inscrutable existence will not do. There is no dispute that something exists. There is no quarrel over mere existence. It is with the nature of what exists and the mode of its operation that the issue arises.
Not to do so seems to concede that only supernatural events can be shown to be designed, which no theist can admit seems also to misconceive the scope and meaning of all ordinary arguments for design in Nature. This misconception is shared both by the reviewers and the reviewed. At least, Mr.
I imagine men have seen so much injustice here that they naturally expect that there must be some day of final judgment somewhere. Nearly every theist is driven to the necessity of having another world in which his god may correct the mistakes he has made in this.
And so, whilst we lie low at His feet, that may be the prayer of a mere theist, but when our hearts go out towards Him, and we are drawn to Himself, that is the prayer that befits Christian aspiration; the ascent of the soul toward God is the true essence of prayer.
It is to assume that the established method is the best, and therefore should not have been superseded by another; but this is the very point in dispute. The truth is, that the theist has assailed the sceptic in his strong and impregnable point, and left the vulnerable part of his system untouched. This may be easily seen.
In these respects, his theory is widely different from that of the "Systême de la Nature," while the two are substantially the same in so far as they relate simply to the constitution of human nature. He is not an Atheist, but a Theist, and a Theist, too, who, believing in Revelation, admits the immortality of man, and a future state of retribution.
This seems to be a jumble of Christianity and Life and Habit. Theist and Atheist The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name. The Peculiar People The only people in England who really believe in God are the Peculiar People. Perhaps that is why they are called peculiar.
Yet nothing is more common than to find the theist, when driven off all other grounds of defence, protesting against a deliberate propaganda of Atheism on the ground of its probable harmful consequences to morals.
In the dialogue of Lucian's to which we have referred, and after the theist has been refuted by the Atheist, Hermes consoles the chief deity, Zeus, by telling him that even though a few may have been won over by the arguments of the Atheist, the vast majority, "the whole mass of uneducated Greeks and the Barbarians everywhere," still remain firm in their faith.
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