majority of the race could not help, for the life of them, judging these " adaptations" to be the effects of design; that this was confirmed by all experience, and that therefore, if Atheism was the truth, still it would always be rejected, and its advocates in fact might as well keep their mouths shut. He affirmed that they must always be, as they ever had been, a vanishing fraction of the race. "Men will still dispute," said he, laughing, "whether Nothing can be plainer from

there ever was an Atheist or not.

all history than that man, however he got it, has a 'religious faculty,' and will be a religious animal."

This nettled our Atheist, and he retorted very cleverly,- that if induction from the phenomena of the "religious faculty" inferred a God, it equally inferred ten thousand, of the most dissimilar attributes, and the most grotesque characteristics ; that the Deist must take the induction from the phenomena of the race generally, and not from two or three Deists in a corner, who were fond of stealing their "Monotheism" from the Bible they abjured, and then setting up as original oracles; that the indications of religious truth are to be gathered from the phenomena of entire humanity, and the incalculable majority of men in all ages have been gross idolaters; now if so, as neither Atheist nor Deist know anything of a doctrine of "human corruption," but deny any such, it must be inferred that the "religious faculty," as its general, that is, normal manifestation, pointed only to Gods, which, for aught we can see, are little better than none! From the Deist's " standpoint" it was difficult to reply to this.

But when the Atheist came to demand the completion of the Deist's system, and to ask how much he could certify of God; what were His aspects towards man; what man's position and duties; what man's origin and destinies; whether he was immortal or not, and so on; in a word, when he came to press the Deist on points, without a solution of which his theory of a deity, to such a being as man, is stark naught, ignorance left him in as sorry a plight as his adversary had been.

"Power and wisdom palpably present in the universe; goodness, extensively ;"-he could get no further than that. To all

the questions man feels so intensely interested in, he could answer only by conjectures and assumptions, and these the Atheist twitted him with often filching from the Bible he derided. "You may

see," said he, "how little man knows on such subjects by looking at him as he has been in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand since history began; you may see how little he knows, and how blindly he hopes and fears, on these subjects. And you cannot, as the Christian can, talk of depravity, -for you, like me, deny it."

On the whole, the Scotchman was delighted with the issue of the controversy. "Ye are twa stalwart chiels," said he,—“ nae doot o' that; ye are like twa fighting bulls of Bashan that have got their horns sae fast locked, that it is hard to see how they are to get loose, except by pulling ilk ither's heads aff. Faith, and I dinna ken that it wad muckle matter. But ye hae proved one thing, ony way; that I canna afford to do without my Bible."

I confess I felt much the same. It, and it alone, so far as I know, supplements the meagre truth of Deism, and enables us to baffle, if we cannot wholly remove, the difficulties which chiefly provoke to Atheism.

LETTER XC.

Yours very truly,

R. E. H. G.

My dear Ellis,

To the Same.

I wish I could gratify you by complying with your request, and give the very words of the entire dialogue to which I referred in my last letter; for it was very instructive and interesting. But it is impossible to recall it exactly, nor can I pretend to give you in full even that part of the argument for which you more

particularly ask, and in which you seem to be so much interested : I mean that in which the Atheist replied to the Deist's undeniably strong argument derived from the religious manifestations of human nature in general. The retort would be easily evaded by you or me, or any Christian, but from the stand-point of the Deist, who ignored the fact of aught abnormal in the present condition of human nature, it seemed to me (what the Deist's silence confessed it to be), quite unanswerable. But, though I cannot recall all the arguments used, still less the expressions, you will not be far out if you imagine the dialogue proceeding somewhat on this wise!

The Deist, as I told you, went on triumphantly for some time with his argument from induction, and I confess I could hardly see how it could be contested; when his adversary said, very quietly, "You believe that the human mind is so constituted as to believe the existence of God?"

"Assuredly," said the other.

"That is, you believe that man was endowed with a mind framed in such a way that he could not but arrive, in the course of its normal development, at the idea of such a being ?"

"And you believe that man is now just what he was when created. You do not believe that he has fallen from an originally higher state; you reject all the fables of the Golden Age,' the transient 'Paradise' of Genesis, and all the other fables by which so-called revelations affect to account for the phenomena of presumed moral deterioration on the part of miserable humanity? "I acknowledge that I reject them all."

"For you are the disciple of Reason alone, and have nothing to do with Revelations ? "

"Nothing."

"What idea of God does that Reason, thus innate in you, instruct you to form of the Deity?"

"That He is One, Infinite, Eternal, Uncaused, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, and perfectly Benevolent."

"Is that the idea which so many as one out of a million of our

race have formed? Is it not the conception of the very few ? ONE God! have not the immense, the overwhelming majority of mankind believed in hundreds ? in thousands? Have they not had 'gods many and lords many?' Gods coordinate and gods subordinate? Gods of different powers in the universe taken jointly, and gods of them taken separately? Gods of all objects natural, gods of all objects artificial? Monkey divinities and cat divinities, sacred cows and sacred calves? Divinities hewn with a hatchet out of a block of wood, and equally divine blocks of wood without even the hatchet being employed upon them? Nay, has not man made out of the very same block (as the Hebrew prophet said) the billet that kindles his fire, and the fuel that heats his oven, and the GOD which he bows down to and worships? Has not the Fetichist prostrated his senseless soul, in adoring silence, before a bit of tinsel or a glittering pebble; and has not the Pantheist, with equal sense, called all things-pebbles and tinsel included the Deity collectively? Though it is sometimes said that man's gods are usually made like himself, I must contend that they are far below himself; destitute even of that spark of intelligence which himself boasts of possessing. He generally takes care before he condescends to worship his god that that little spark of reason shall be put out! Or rather," he continued sarcastically, "I think it may still be said that man's gods are usually a little above him-simply because they, at all events, have not thought themselves divine, nor worshipped what themselves have made. An Egyptian may adore a cat, a Brahmin a sacred cow; but the cat and the cow neither believe themselves divine nor worship one another. And if they could but comprehend the absurdity of wise man's genuflexions and offerings, they would certainly break out into one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity, and indulge in a hearty 'guffaw' at their human ́adorers. Some of you talk about the necessary inference that, as man did not create himself, he must owe his existence to a God who is uncaused; rather, from man's general practice through all races and all ages, you ought to argue in a different way, and say that it is one of the characteristic inferences of man's wise head,

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that a god must be created before it is to be adored: for man, you see, in the immense majority of cases, devoutly worships the work of his own fingers,-generally clumsy enough! Instead of his gods fabricating him, and hence, having, as you say, a title to his worship, he creates them, and then adores them for the attributes he has gratuitously bestowed. You seem to think that it is the normal condition of mankind to break out into the poetry, -sublime poetry, I admit,—of the Hebrew bard, as he gazed on the spectacle of the starry heavens :-'When I behold the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?' On the contrary," said he, laughing, as he pursued the contrast of men in general, Iman when he has surrounded himself with his artificial divine deformities, the divine monsters he has turned out of his own workshop, his little grotesque images of clay, wood, or stone, and contemplates their ugly perfections-seems to say to the frights -When I behold the idols which my fingers have made-what is man in comparison?' And sure enough he may well ask the question. Now if you say that the bulk of the species have looked beyond these works of their hands, and have recognised a supreme God under these fantastic forms, I deny, 1. That many of them have; 2. That of those who have acknowledged that there are ranks and orders among their divinities, very, very few have even approximated to that comprehensive, and I will even add, sublime abstraction by which you have defined the Deity. As to the absolute Monotheists, they have ever been a most miserable minority. Even those who have looked beyond subordinate deities in any sense, and acknowledged a Father of Gods and Men, such as Jupiter, for example (by my faith, he was the father of a good many of them, by all accounts-the name was not ill-bestowed), have been comparatively few. As to Jupiter, as generally conceived, who would not just as soon have worshipped any of the rabble that filled his Olympus, as that old roué? The sort of Supreme God recognised by some Polytheists has been far enough from resembling that notion you have given