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Facts and Fancies of Men, Women, and Peoples

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A HOMILY

ON

The Historic Forms of Anti-Theism.

"The world by wisdom knew not God."-1 Cor. i. 21.

RELIGIOUS errors have a chameleon faculty of changing their appearance: they paint themselves with the mental characters of their patrons, and the tastes and tendencies of the times. Like actors, they have habiliments to suit the audiences they address, and the parts they have to play. Hence we find the same error at one time in the coarse and scamped attire of rude life and feeble intellect, and in another in the silken and flowing robes of culture, philosophy, and genius. In truth, the influence-ay, and the very existence of error depends upon appearance. It is not but in semblance. It is a mirage in the deserts of intellect; it fascinates the vision, and raises the expectation, of the parched traveller in the distance, but dissipates into air as he approaches and looks into it. To strip it is to kill it: take off its robes, and expose it in the daylight of reason, and it evaporates in the sun,

Of all the errors in this erring world, that to whose consideration we are going to devote this discourse seems to us the most important. It is the Beelzebub of falsehood. It strikes at the root of all morality; it reduces man to a mere engine, and spreads a starless midnight over the future. We use the word ANTI-THEISM in preference to ATHEISM, because of its definitive meaning. Atheism, literally, signifies without God, and is therefore susceptible of various applications. Plato, for example, uses it in three different senses. He calls those atheists, who deny the existence of God absolutely; those who believe in his existence, but deny his interference in human concerns; and those who believe in both, but suppose him

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indifferent to human crimes. Now, these are very varied applications of one word, but they would all seem to admit of a rational justification. All who do not practically believe in God are, in truth, atheists: they are "without God in the world." But the word anti-theism we regard as designating a positive denial of the being of a God. In confining our attention, therefore, to anti-theism, we have nothing to do with the various theories of Deism; nor with the mental godlessness of the savage and the thoughtless; nor with the manifold atheistic notions that float about undefined and unsystematized in the societies of the vulgar and depraved; nor yet with that practical infidelity which is everywhere developed in the absence of the true religion. Our work is with certain intellectual theories, all of which are distinguished by this one fact the exclusion from their beliefs of an intelligent and personal First Cause. We thus narrow our ground to traverseable limits.

In clearing our path, we may yet premise that we are not going to canvass the merits of certain anti-theistic notions that will fall in our way as we proceed. Our work is to show, rather than to sift, them; to sketch their history, rather than to controvert their pretensions. In truth, as a rule, to discuss the merits of any error is to clothe it with an unnatural importance to expose it is enough. All errors, like the monsters of the "briny deep," will die if you drag them forth from their turbid element, and lift them into the sunny realms of day.

At the outset, we are met by a difficulty of classification. The varied forms of anti-theism have but little in them peculiar to time or place. The ancient and modern, the eastern and western, have much in common. The hypotheses, for example, which Anaximander, Democritus, and Strato, entertained in Greece, upwards of twenty centuries ago, have appeared with but slender modifications in France, Germany, and England, in more modern times, and are, more or less, adopted by anti-theists of the present hour. Its history, in fact, is not like the history of life, which has a native zone,

and a continuity in its development, genealogically binding the last oak to the first acorn, but more like the history of meteoric bodies; they have no particular connexion with any period or locality: they sweep each hemisphere, and flash on each age.

Not being able, therefore, with logical satisfaction, to group them together according to their age or scene, we shall adopt the principle of CONGRUITY, and look at them in their relation to each other rather than in their relation to any time or space. We hope to give a tolerably fair revelation of them under the two following heads-their points of resemblance and their points of dissimilarity.

There are three

I. THEIR POINTS OF RESEMBLANCE. features common to all the anti-theistic theories that have come under our observation-cosmology, materialism, and eternity.

All anti-theists are cosmologists: their varied theories are but so many hypotheses, proposed to account for the origin of the universe. Whence came this terraqueous globe, with its endless tribes of life, and forms of beauty, and unbounded treasures of sea and soil and mine?-these awful heavens, stretching away into the infinite blue, with its blazing suns and stars innumerable, and clouds laden with oceans and coursing with thunderbolts?—and this thinking soul within me which observes and feels and reflects, which recollects the past, and trembles at the future, whence came it?-oh! whence? This prying into the cause of all-this questioning about the origin of the universe is the common starting-point, we shall find, of all anti-theisms. The question itself is truly a natural one. All thoughtful men have asked it a thousand times. It rises amongst the first inquiries of opening intellect. Our great poet felt so, and represents the primal man, as he first woke into conscious life, as looking at the sublime fabric of nature with his soul struggling with the question.

"As new waked from soundest sleep, Soft on the flowery herb I found me laid,

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