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Updated: June 15, 2025
It had taken for granted a body of beliefs respecting God, man, and the world. Descartes was a theist. He taught that there is but one substance; that God and the world the totality of things are the manifestation of one impersonal being. In it, the classic and the romantic styles are combined; the spirit of the Middle Ages blends with the unity and harmony of Homer and Virgil.
Not a solitary problem presents itself to the philosophical Theist, at the present day, which has not existed from the time that philosophers began to think out the logical grounds and the logical consequences of Theism.
The theist should have denied this, we say, if he would have raised the ever-blessed God above all contact with sin, and placed his cause upon high and impregnable ground, far above the attacks of the sceptic. But as it is, he has placed that cause upon false grounds, and thereby exposed it to the successful shafts of the adversary.
Fiske calls an "Anthropomorphic Theist" finds from experience that his system of religion say Christianity creates and sustains a class of emotions and general habits of thought which he feels to be the highest and the best of which he is capable, it is useless for a "Cosmic Theist" to offer such a man another system of religion, in which the conditions essential to the existence of these particular emotions and habits of thought are manifestly absent.
Except during a short time just preceding and during his stay in London he seems never to have been an atheist; neither was he ever quite a Christian; but as between atheism and Christianity he was very much further removed from the former than from the latter. He used to call himself a deist, or theist; and said that a deist was as much like an atheist as chalk is like charcoal.
Who knows how far John Locke followed the safe example. That he was a materialist his writings prove; and every far sighted Theist will admit that Atheism is the natural termination of Materialism.
When I had finished my medical education in 1882, I found myself, like many young medical men, a convinced materialist as regards our personal destiny. I had never ceased to be an earnest theist, because it seemed to me that Napoleon's question to the atheistic professors on the starry night as he voyaged to Egypt: "Who was it, gentlemen, who made these stars?" has never been answered.
But if he means that matter cannot be made to do the work of mind in constructions, machines, or organisms, he is surely wrong. "Sovitur ambulando," vel scribendo; he confuted his argument in the act of writing the sentence. That is just what machines and organisms are for; and a consistent Christian theist should maintain that is what all matter is for.
The problem is created by the theory. Dismiss the theory and no problem is left. And it is in line with what is done in other directions, that, having created the difficulty, the theist should present it to the non-theist as one of the questions that he must answer. In reality there is no problem of evil in connection with ethics.
Bradlaugh's perfect serenity, at once fearless and unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the Atheist's calm strength. Mr. Bradlaugh returned to England at the end of December, worn to a shadow and terribly weak, and for many a long month he bore the traces of his wrestle with death.
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