stration of this startling assertion. In its place there is presented to us an unreasoned and superficial hypothesis as to the origin, nature, and history of religion. Religion, in Feuerbach's opinion, is selfdelusion in the form of self-deification. It is his own nature which man projects out of himself, personifies, and worships. He idealises himself, believes the ideal real, and adores the imaginary being whom he has created. Religion is thus a phase of insanity under which the whole human race laboured for thousands of years, until the one wise man appeared who discovered that his fellow-men had been idiotically bowing and cringing before their own shadow. It is this discovery which makes it "clear as the sun and evident as the day, not only that there is no God, but that there can be none." Mainlander claims, in a very recently published work, to have for the first time founded atheism on a scientific basis. But to accomplish his task he finds it necessary to represent Christianity as, like Budhism, a system of atheism. Maintaining the atheism of these two religions, he infers that atheism is the natural goal of human development. The mass of assertions which he accumulates around this ludicrous argument he assures us is a scientific demonstration. Czolbe, Dühring, and some other German atheists, might be referred to as equally audacious in profession and feeble in performance. A zealous English

B

advocate of atheism, Mr Bradlaugh, has frequently said, "If God is defined to mean an existence other than the existence of which I am a mode, then I deny God, and affirm that it is impossible God can be. That is, I affirm one existence, and deny that there can be more than one." But the terms "existence" and "mode" are here employed in so peculiar and equivocal a manner that the declaration may have either a theistic, pantheistic, or atheistic meaning. It has no proper or definite meaning.

Atheism is essentially irrational when not merely critical. And even when merely critical it is not very rational. This statement is based on the entire argumentation in the previous course of lectures. The chief aim of that course was to exhibit the evidence for the existence of God, and the proof of theism is necessarily the refutation of atheism. Further, a secondary aim, kept in view throughout, was directly to repel the objections which atheism has brought against the validity and sufficiency of the fundamental theistic proofs; to show that their weight is scarcely appreciable when fairly poised against the reasons in the opposite scale, and that, almost without exception, the subtlest and most plausible of them indicate only defects or difficulties in the metaphysics of religious speculation, and should have no influence whatever on the practical decision, at which the

mind ought to arrive, as to whether there is a God or not. If I succeeded in doing so I must, of course, have refuted the atheism which rests on these objections, the atheism which is purely critical. But whether I succeeded or not, it will be better now to offer some general considerations on atheism in its intellectual, emotional, and moral aspects, than to return on what has been already done, or at least, on what has been already tried to be done.1

II.

There

How does atheism satisfy the intellect? is around us a world of order and beauty; a world in which elements are wonderfully compounded and qualities wonderfully associated in which there is at once an admirable regularity and an admirable diversity-in which all things work together. What explanation does atheism give of this world? There is an atheism which does not pretend to give any explanation; which tells us even that there is no explanation to be given, and that it is foolish to ask for any. This kind of atheism, to be consistent, ought to forbid all investigation whatever; ought to lay an arrest on thought and research at the very outset of their course; ought to explain nothing; ought not to recognise that there is any such thing as law and 1 See Appendix III.

order. This kind of atheism is a direct and complete violation of the rational principle in man. The human intellect is by its very constitution compelled to seek first causes for events, and final causes for order and adaptation; and it has no right to stop short, as the atheist would have it, when it cannot advance farther without rising to the apprehension of a Creative Reason. If it will not go as far as its principles legitimately lead, it has no right to start at all; it must deny itself entirely; it must wholly renounce its own nature. In other words, a brute may, but a man cannot, be a consistent atheist of this class. Pure empiricism is so far beneath humanity as to be beyond its reach, and can support nothing either human or rational.

There is an atheism which teaches that the world is but the last effect of an eternal succession of causes and effects, and that there has been no first cause. The mind, however, rejects as absolutely absurd the notion of an eternal series of worlds which depends on no originating principle. It demands a first cause, a true and self-existent first cause. A series may be indefinitely extensible; it cannot be infinitely extended. Where there is a last term there must have been a first term. If each of a series of effects be dependent, all the effects of that series must be dependent, and on a cause which precedes them. If the last link of a

chain be supported by the link above it, that by the third link, the third by the fourth, and so on, the entire chain cannot hang upon nothing. An endless adjournment of causes is a process which is meaningless and useless, and in which reason can never acquiesce. For reason to abandon belief in a self-existent eternal cause for belief in an eternal series, every part of which is the effect of an antecedent cause, while the whole is an effect without a cause, is a suicidal, a self-destructive act. Besides, the supposition of the eternity of the series of worlds obviously cannot free us from the necessity of believing in an eternally operative intelligence to account for the order, the mechanical and organic adjustments, the finite minds, &c., to be found in these worlds. The conviction which a man feels when looking at St Paul's that it must have had an architect of wonderful genius, is not disturbed or lessened by his knowledge that it was built two centuries ago. And in like manner, the

inference that the world must have had an intelligent cause ought to be as legitimate and strong were it eternal, or the last of an eternal series, as if it were the only world and had been created four thousand years or four days ago. The inference from order and adjustment to intelligence is unaffected by the consideration of time; it is valid for all time, and for eternity as well as for time. The eternity of the series of worlds supposed can