not indescribably worse. When sickness and loss come to the atheist they may be patiently and bravely borne, but they cannot be welcomed as they may by one who feels that they are sent to him by supreme wisdom and love to purify and discipline his character, and to work out in him and for him an exceeding weight of glory. It is not for him to say

"Oh! there is never sorrow of heart

That shall lack a timely end,

If but to God we turn, and ask

Of Him to be our friend!"

And what can he say in its stead? When death enters his home and strikes down some dear one, he hears no Father's voice, sees no Father's hand, feels no consolation of a comforting Spirit, but sits, in a darkness which is unrelieved by a single ray of light, mourning over the work of the senseless energies of nature. When death lays hold of himself, and he knows that there is no escape, he can only yield himself up to a dread uncertainty, or to the cold comfort of annihilation, the hope of being dissolved into the elements of which he was at first compounded-earth to earth, ashes to ashes; mind and heart as well as body to ashes-thoughts, affections, virtue to ashes; all, dust to dust. Is there much encouragement to virtue there?

The atheist may reply, I take from life no moral support which it really possesses; I do not remove

God from the world, but find the world without God, and I cannot rest my confidence on what seems to me to be a fiction. He may urge, also, that truth must be accepted, whether it appear to us to be all that is morally desirable or not. But one who answers thus cannot have understood the tenor of what we have advanced. If the atheist be right, of course, it is not he who takes from life any hope, or strength, or charm which truly belongs to it. That truth must be accepted whether sweet or bitter, consoling or desolating, is what no one doubts. But the question is, Can truth and goodness be at variance with one another? Can the belief of falsehood be more favourable to the moral perfection of mankind than the belief of truth? The most intrepid lover of truth may well hesitate before he answers in the affirmative. It is probably, indeed, impossible to show on atheistical principles why reason and virtue should not be in antagonism-why falsehood, if believed, should not be more conducive in many cases to virtue and happiness than truth; but the conclusion is none the less one which must seem perfectly monstrous to any mind which is not grievously perverted either intellectually or morally. If it were accepted, mental life could have no unity or harmony. For who could decide between the competing and conflicting claims of truth and virtue, of reason and morality? Neither

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the truth unfavourable to morality nor the morality capable of being injured by truth would deserve, or could be expected to receive, the homage due to truth and morality when allied and accordant.

Atheism has not unfrequently been advocated on political grounds. Religion has been presented as the support of tyranny and the cause of strife. Its abolition, it has been argued, would emancipate the mind and secure peace. This view will always be found to rest on the confusion of religion with superstition. But superstition is as distinct from religion as from atheism. Superstition and atheism are both contraries to religion, and, as was long ago remarked, are closely akin. They are related to religion as the alternating feverish heat and shivering cold of bodily disease are related to the equable temperature of health. The one gives rise to the other; the one easily passes into the other. Each is to a large extent chargeable, not only with the evils which it directly produces, but with those which it originates by way of reaction. Both flow from ignorance and erroneous views of Divine things. "The atheist," as Plutarch tells us, "thinks that there is no God; the superstitious man would fain think so, but believes against his will, for he fears to do otherwise. Superstition generates atheism, and afterwards furnishes it with an apology, which, although neither true nor lovely, yet lacks not a specious pretence." On the

other hand, atheism drives men into superstition. Wherever it spreads, religious credulity and servility spread along with it, or spring up rapidly after it. A reasonable religion is the only effective barrier against either atheism or superstition.

It has been disputed whether atheism or superstition be politically the more injurious. Perhaps the problem is too vague to be resolved. But certainly the spread of atheism in a land may well be regarded with the most serious alarm. In the measure that a people ceases to believe in God and an eternal world, it must become debased, disorganised, and incapable of achieving noble deeds. History confirms this on many a page. "All epochs," wrote Goethe, "in which faith, under whatever form, has prevailed, have been brilliant, heart-elevating, and fruitful, both to contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on the contrary, in which unbelief, under whatever form, has maintained a sad supremacy, even if for the moment they glitter with a false splendour, vanish from the memory of posterity, because none care to torment themselves with the knowledge of that which has been barren."

"The idea of an intelligent First Cause," says Mazzini, "once destroyed, -the existence of a moral law, supreme over men, and constituting an obligation, a duty imposed upon all men, is destroyed with it; so also all possibility of a law

of progress, or intelligent design, regulating the life of humanity. Both progress and morality then become mere transitory facts, having no deeper source than the tendency or impulse of individual organisation; no other sanction than the arbitrary will or varying interest of individuals, or force. In fact, the only imaginable sources of life are- God, chance, or the blind, insuperable force of things; and if we deny the first to accept either of the others, in the name of whom, or of what, can we assume any right to educate? In the name of whom, or of what, can we condemn the man who abandons the pursuit of the general good through egotism? In the name of whom, or of what, can you protest against injustice, or assert your duty and right of contending against it? Whence can you deduce the existence of an aim common to all men, and therefore giving you an authority to declare to them that they are bound by duty to fraternal association in pursuit of that common aim?"

The prevalence of atheism in any land must bring with it national decay and disaster. Its triumph in our land would bring with it, I believe, hopeless national ruin. If the workmen of the large towns of this country were, as a body, to adopt the principles which have at certain periods swayed the minds of the workmen of Paris and