English Secularism

edge is like expedi

rk

n Ne

t. No wonder many find abiding pleasure in the intellectual refutation of the errors of supernaturalism and in putting its priests to confusion. Absorbed in the antagonism of theology, many lose sight of ultimate utility, and regard error, not as a misfortune to be alleviated, so much as a fault to be exposed. Like the theologian whose color they take, they do not much consider whether their method causes men to dislike the truth through its manner of being offered to them. Their ambition is to make those

, "Liberty is not a

he uses of libert

do we wan

fighting-which is still popular among them, and which has led the pub

like other passions "grows by what it feeds upon." Yet a limited number of such paladins of investigation are not without uses in the economy of civilisations. They resemble the mighty hun

ther hunt in the jungles of theology nor storm strongholds. We all know hundreds in every great town who have freed themselves, or have been freed by others, from ecclesiastical error, who remain supine. Content with their own superiority (which they owe to the pioneers who w

ir folly 'tis h

es by the laws of

nd leave fools to

ass can be go

fool-theory are. Coptic thinkers forget that every man is a fool in respect of any question on which he gives an opinion without having thought independently upon it. With patience you can make a thinker out of

what the severity of the service is, in the following passage from his Mischiefs of Natural Religion:-"Of all human antipathies that which the believer in a God bears to the unbeliever, is the fullest, the most unqualified, and the most universal. The m

uasion, have published? His notion of immortality and heaven is that at the consummation of all things he, and you, and I, and John Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the Living Skeleton, and Queen Elizabeth, and the Hottentot, Venus, and Thutell, and Probert, and the Twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs, and Genghis Khan and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors and all his posterity,-yea, all men, and all women, and all children that have ever been, or ever

husiastic about it. The Comtists have done something to preach a doctrine of humanity, and to put an end to this piti

ience and generosity takes care of it, and incites it to instruct in

more gi

e the race

ines itself to itself, becomes stati

turns by w

ne hair's br

ever, a new order of insurgent thought of the excelsior caste which seeks to climb the heights. Distinguished writers against theology in the past have regarded destructive criticism as preparing the way to higher conceptions of life and duty. If so little has been done in this direction among working class thinkers, it is because destructiveness is m