of Him, and which I suspect you have stolen from Moses and the Bible, like the rest of you Deists. But as for the mass-the idea that these - the myriads of gross idolaters - have risen, in the very midst of their grovelling, crawling superstitions, to the conception of such a God as you define, is absurd; the mere circumstance that they are idolaters proves that such conceptions are veiled to them. To tell me that a man has any sublime ideas of an infinite spiritual Creator, an infinite Monarch of the universe, when he is all the while mopping and mowing in adoration of a monkey, or a block of his own hewing, is nonsense. I can under

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stand a little what you mean (though I deny its force as argument) when you talk of looking up from Nature to Nature's God; I understand what you mean when you talk of rising from 'effects to causes' though I deny that the one are effects, and that the causes' are any other than imaginary; but that idolaters—who are the bulk of mankind. should look up' from idols of their own making to Nature's God, that is from 'effects' which they worship as causes to a Supreme Cause of all things,—is to me quite incredible.”

Well, and what is the object of this long tirade?" said the other, quite innocently, and apparently unconscious of the retort preparing for him.

"Why, that if you have any candour, you must acknowledge that the all but universal idea of God is not your idea; that yours is the idea of a very few; that in the ratio of a million to one, the notions of men have been the most enormous and grotesque parodies on what you would call the Deity!"

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Certainly I won't, for I can't deny it; but still they have had the idea of a God; in harmony with the conditions which I have represented as a fundamental law of the human mind." "A God!—an idea of ten thousand, you mean. Why did you say you inferred that the formation of such a notion was one of the conditions of the constitution of the human intellect?"

"Because in the immense majority of mankind, we find some such idea developed. The Atheists are, and ever have been, such a miserable minority."

"And just so I say of the Monotheists. Ergo, if I grant that it is one of the conditions of the human mind that it should form some conception of a God, because it is the actual condition of the immense majority of mankind that they have it,

-you must, in like manner, grant that it is one of the conditions of the human mind that it should form most various, hideous, odd, grotesque, imperfect, degrading conceptions of a God, for such have been the conceptions, such they are still, of the immense majority of the race; those who have resembled you, my deistical friend, having been a most miserable minority.' You say man is as he was created; you say that he has just as much reason and conscience as he ever had; and you see what follows from an induction of facts. If man necessarily forms some idea of a God or gods, we must infer by parity of reason from induction, that he must ever form most unworthy and degrading notions of him."

I was curious to see how the Deist would reply to this argument; I considered how I should answer it myself if I were in his place. If I believed, as he did, that just what God had created man, such man is now; that man still framed his notions of God, and of the worship due to Him, in obedience to that law which God had originally impressed on his nature, and under the conditions of thought originally assigned; it was hard, in the face of such general results, to infer anything else than that either God had made a strange mistake in constituting human nature, if he really designed it to have that just and consistent idea of Him proclaimed by the Deist; or that he never designed anything of the kind; or that, as the Bible says, man is no longer what God made him. This last solution, our Deist's reason had thrown aside contemptuously; and no outlet to the ravine of rock seemed possible in that direction. I looked every way carefully, but could discern no mode of escaping; it was a cul de sac to a Deist.

Thus it seemed indisputable that the Atheist and the Deist were both perfectly right; successful in confuting one another, without the possibility of escaping counter-confutation. The Deist was right in maintaining that the fundamental laws of the

human mind necessitate, and must ever lead to the adoption of some notions of a Deity; because from induction we see that in the immensely greater number of cases, they have done so and the Atheist was right in maintaining that the equally universal fact of man's having formed notions of a Deity utterly degrading, grotesque, and unworthy, shows that this also, in the majority of cases, is the inevitable condition of the human mind, as proved by a similar induction; so that it seems strange paradox! that man is generally necessitated to discover a God, but that in general He will be such that it hardly matters two buttons whether He be discovered or not! "Therefore," said the disciple of M. Comte, in conclusion, as you twit me with the uselessness of my mission, and the absurdity of attempting to convert mankind to my views (which, I frankly acknowledge, have ever been confined to a very few), you must permit me to remind you that the folly of your efforts for the illumination of mankind is equally egregious. Indeed, those who have held your sublime views of the Deity,-pure Monotheists, have been scarcely more numerous-except as they have derived their notions from the Bible revelation which you reject— than the Atheists themselves."

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My deistical friend made one desperate effort to recover his ground; but it was very slippery - and he fell. I had no hope of his maintaining his footing; but even I was surprised at the little he could reply to the argument. The Atheist pursued his advantage and said, complacently enough, "I must, nevertheless, contend that you are chargeable with one absurdity from which I am free. Believing in no God, and that the human mind is merely an assemblage of 'conditions' without a final cause, it is not at all wonderful to me that some of its notions should be, strange, odd, and incongruous; but if, as you say, man was formed by that superior and matchless intelligence you adore; if he is now what that intelligence framed him, and equipped with laws. of thought which necessarily develope a knowledge of the Deity; how is it that he should everywhere exhibit the curious phenomena I have insisted on? It is utterly incomprehensible. That man should fancy there is a God when there is none, may be odd

enough; but that when God has created him so as to know and adore Him, man, being still possessed of all that God had originally endowed him with, should fail to find Him, is to me an unfathomable mystery."

"or can be, to this

"What answer there is," said I, interposing, taunt, on the deistical hypothesis, I know not. Permit me to tell you, however, that it is of no avail against Christianity; for the theories of Christianity and Deism are antipodal. Man, as you have insisted, does form, in the immense majority of cases, and ever has formed, the most degrading and absurd notions of the Deity; but Christianity is expressly founded on this admission, on the lamentable reality of all the difficulties which you have urged; it acknowledges as its foundation that while man has a nature which prompts to religious thought and feeling, that nature is corrupt· and that the world by wisdom knew not God.' He was polite enough to acknowledge that the argument he had used did not affect the theory of Christianity - except as affecting every other theistical theory; that is, as ultimately involving the consideration of the permission of such a state of things as required the Divine intervention; in other words, as involving the problem of "the origin of evil." I told him that that was an abyss which I, for one, had many years ago explored as far as I intended, and was glad to have groped out with my torch still unextinguished; but that, however deep, it left the arguments against Atheism unimpaired, and being in itself utterly unfathomable, could justify no rejection of those arguments ;unless we are at liberty to argue against what we can comprehend from what we cannot. To this he did not reply; and in truth it was high time to light our candles and go to bed.

Ever yours,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER XCI.

To a Friend who had become a Deist.

My dear Friend,

1852.

For, in spite of your doubts, I shall not cease so to address you. You say that as you are no longer a Christian, — more’s the pity, say I, you suppose I cannot think anything worthy of the name of "friendship" can sincerely subsist between us; that persons whose sympathies must be so imperfect, whose intercourse, restrained and frigid, while it lasts, must, after a brief interval, be so sadly broken, and broken for ever, can hardly be friends.

I, on the other hand, shall maintain, in spite of it, that if you have lost all sympathy with me, I have lost none for you ; —and that even as a brother who has an infidel brother, or a father who has an infidel son, would prove himself a strange Christian brother or father by renouncing brother or son, so a Christian friend would prove himself a very odd Christian and a very odd friend who should abjure one who has been his friend because he is no longer a Christian. On the contrary, as a Christian father will feel and show a double solicitude and tenderness towards his erring child, so must a friend discover not a diminished but a quickened anxiety for the welfare of an erring friend.

The aspect of his love will be indeed changed, and sorrow will mingle with it but, believe me, my friend, it will be love still.

Strange doctrine this of yours! It is as though I were told that a man, fearing a friend had lost his way in a midnight passage of the mountains, might, with a quiet conscience, at once give up all hope of seeing him again, and instead of setting out with light and guides to seek him, coolly sit down in the chimney corner, saying, "Wellno doubt the poor soul is gone to the devil but it can't be helped!"

I have not so learned Christianity; nor was this the example