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while the intellectual and moral qualities displayed on every page must command the respect even of dissentients.

Part Fourth gives a summary of the views of Christian teachers and sects concerning a future life. Clearness of statement, copiousness of learning and condensation of material characterize its chapters. Its account of the rise, progress and prevalente of Universalist sentiments is comparatively full and interesting. Though related to the general subject of the work, the Critical Dissertations of Part Fifth possess an interest and value of their own. Each of them discusses some question or presents some aspect of the great theme with thoroughness and power. The chapter on the Transmigration of the Soul is exceedingly subtle and fascinating. We see not how any faith in the Resurrection of the Flesh can survive the reading of the dissertation devoted to that subject. The Critical History of Disbelief in a Future Life is one of the ablest essays we have read. We regret that we cannot discuss some of the questions it raises and present a specimen of its trenchant criticism, philosophical analysis and masterly argument. The chapter on the Local Fate of Man in the Astronomic Universe discusses a problem. of intense interest with lucidity and original suggestiveness.

The Doctrine of Future Punishment receives no mercy from Mr. Alger's hands. His dissertation upon it for historical accuracy and philosophical power is one of the best in the volume. It is something more than a resumé of what has been thought and written upon the subject. From interior interest in the theme he enters the arena of discussion, and deals with the doctrine as an enemy to be crushed rather than as an error to be exposed, and he hurls logical bolt after bolt at it with a skill and force that no dexterity can parry and no shuffling can dodge. Mr. Alger is a decided believer in the final recovery of all souls. He differs from most Universalists in the grounds on which his faith is based. They deduce their belief from the New Testament teachings; he finds it in the spirit of the religion rather than in its records,-involved in its cardinal principles, not enunciated in proof-texts. The total inAluence of his work is decidedly hopeful and cheering.

We regret that our review of this work is so rapid and inade

quate. A work covering such a vast field of inquiry, and treating such a variety of important and interesting themes as this volume does, cannot be justly dealt with in a dozen pages. We should decidedly dissent from some of the author's views. The style is sometimes too inflated and ornate. But the merits of the work completely overshadow its defects; its noble qualities disarm dissent, and criticism gives way to gratitude.

We cannot close without a brief reference to the Bibliography, a novel but most important feature of the work. Mr. Ezra Abbot, the accomplished associate librarian of Harvard University, has furnished a list of all the works to be found that relate to the destiny of the soul. Nearly five thousand works are mentioned in this catalogue, which will give invaluable assistance to future students in this department of literature. It contains various matters for reflection also. It refers to nearly a thousand works on Endless Punishment and related themes, and hundreds of works on such topics as the Salvation of Infants, the Fate of Individual Souls and the like. The presence of this vast fund of information concerning the means of study, must provoke many minds to independent research and scholarship.

ARTICLE VI.

Atheism and its Exponents.

ATHEISM is of rare occurrence. One may journey many historic miles and leagues-miles and leagues amid dense populations of every sort of people, Pagan, Jewish, Christian-and not find a single atheist, a man theoretically and practically "without God in the world." The historic interval is wide between men of this type, as some recent attempts at voyaging in that direction have sufficed to convince the writer of this article.

Addison calls atheists a 66 monstrous species of men," and goes on to show that they are as scarce in the human, as megatheria in the animal, world. Others-men of wide research and careful reflection-deny their existence altogether, affirming that no reality of the kind has come to the surface of history, no convulsion in humanity's sea having thrown any upon the "lone barren isle" of absolute disbelief. "The charge of atheism," one tells us, "is a mere calumny in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand," which is equivalent to saying it is true in no case. "It may justly be questioned whether any man ever seriously adopted such a principle." 2 "A philosophical and consistent atheist is as much an impossibility as a mathematician who cannot count two, or as a round square, or a three-cornered circle." 3" When the scholar has denied the existence of God, hear the man, ask him, take him unawares, and you will see that all his words imply the idea of God; and that faith in God is, without his knowing it, at the bottom of his heart." Even Hume, like Byron,

"Doubted if doubts were doubting,"

half denying his own denials, or doing it in much larger degree, rising to-day out of the negations of yesterday, and concluding all others had done the same. Well versed in sceptical literature, taking to it by an instinct of his nature as the Stormy Petrel to the disturbed surface of the sea, still he had read of no one whom he could call an unqualified atheist; and from all his intercourse with the coterie of French Encyclopedists, who bandied the most vulgar epithets of disbelief with openmouthed bravado, he failed to see the man in whom he could trace no lines of divine emotion and incipient trust-the root of faith, at least, if not its trunk. Dining with Baron d'Holback, and the French Materialists, in 1764,5 who had succeeded, as they fancied, in running philosophy "into the ground," degrading mind into matter and thought into sensation, and in

4

1 W. J. Fox, author of an instructive volume on " The Religious Ideas." 2 Encyc. Brit. Theodore Parker. M. Cousin. 5 See Buckle's Hist. Civ. vol. 1. p. 621; also, Burton's Life of Hume, vol. 2, p. 220.

wiping out the name of God, with their earthy sop, past all hope of recovery, still the acute Scotchman insisted he had never met an atheist. "You have been most unfortunate," replied the Baron; "but you are, at this very moment, sitting at the table with seventeen of them." Hume was well aware of the professed atheism around him, but doubted if it went quite to the bottom of life, there being still a "deep below the lowest deep" to which it had penetrated, where divine things were yet mirrored, afar off, perchance, and dimly, but really, as the stormy face of the midnight heavens is reflected in the depths of every river, lake and sea.

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The ground taken by the majority of those who tell us atheism is impossible, is this: human nature is religiously constituted, which is enough to save it from a constant and consistent denial. Their argument is deduction, not induction. Reason gives belief, let reasoning give what it may; as conscience gives testimony to the absolute distinctions of right and wrong, no matter how skilfully Thomas Hobbes or any other may argue that these matters of a moral kind are all on the surface and merely conventional, settled by majorities in republics and monarchs in monarchies. No man's moral sense believes this, seeing straight through all rubbish of logic, all the dust-wool wherewith dialecticians would blind it, to the actual world of moral principles which man did not create and cannot change. We believe in order even while chaos is surging around, in a solid sub-stratum below the surface-drift, in a justice that is immutable and not conventional, good for all space and all time; and no conscience can be convinced to the contrary. There may be a time before this moral faith assumed. definite shape in the sphere of consciousness; still it is there in the mechanism of the inward being, as the future oak is in the acorn. So the religious sense gives the notion and belief of God. Argument cannot hinder it. Playing blind alters not the fact of vision; they who think, in all honesty, that they see not, still seeing, all sharing those spontaneous intuitions which are the logic of nature, not always of the schools, in many cases not of the individual man. Hobbes saw the absolute in morals that he denied; his scheme of philosophy, grow

ing out of the tendency of his time and his individual culture, may have claimed all moralities to be only dissolving views like the manners and customs of the ages; his inner sense, born, not bred, given of God, not picked up in the school of sensationalism, saw matters in another light. So every atheist sees God.

"Mind, mind alone, (bear witness earth and heaven),

The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime." 6

Others urge the impossibility of atheism in the light of history. Their. argument is inductive, not deductive. They claim to have made a wide and careful study of religious phenomena, ancient and modern, in mankind and in men, in their best aspects and not less in their worst. They have found the religious sense existing in various stages of development, low and feeble in the Savage, little put forth in the Sensualist, strong and joyous in the Saint. They have found religion broken into many forms; theologians without number, good, bad, and indifferent, have fallen under their gaze; worship in countless types, from the crudest crouching before reptiles mystically inverted, up to the adoration of the true God. They have seen the slow march of the race coming over the via sacra, which has been largely a via dolorosa, a way of groping and stumbling; just so the stars came slow and late and with hard labor, into perfect spheres, old chaos long holding sway. Nature's millennial age has come; religion's not yet. They have observed Fetichism, the religion of those whose power of abstraction, little practised, would not allow them to divide off spirit from matter, God from nature; Polytheism, the faith of such as were able to rise a little higher in their conceptions, dividing spirit from matter, the Gods from Nature, giving a divinity to each city, to each part of the universe, to every fine art of beauty or pleasure, every useful art of head or hand work, every

• Cousin remarks: "It is sufficient for us to enter into ourselves, to fathom consciousness by reflection, and make it give up what it contains."Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

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