Page:A World Without God.pdf/10

. Whether it be darkness or not is the question at issue; to the Atheist the world is "dark with Gods", and as these awful shadows pass, the sunshine of hope and of love illumines the saddened earth. Nothing is proved by Miss Cobbe's assumption that Atheism is darkness, nor by mine that Atheism is light. Sober investigation, not metaphor, is the only Ariadne's clue through this worse than Cretan labyrinth.

The first of the suggested changes in the "Faithless World" are "the suppression of public and private worship and of teaching; the secularisation or destruction everywhere of cathedrals, churches, and chapels; and the extinction of the clerical profession". And then follows a wail over the "effacement from each landscape of the towers and spires of the churches". "Worship" would certainly vanish under an Atheistic régime, but "preaching" not, unless the word "preaching" be confined to dissertations on superstitious dogmas; the teaching of social duties, of civic and personal obligations, will for a long time to come form a necessary part of public education. Why should cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise, not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall hereafter be consecrated for Man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich color, its stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy subdued twilight soothing as "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land?" Nay, but reconsecrate it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar and of arch, but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter echo the majestic music of Wagner and of Beethoven, and the teachers of the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and the wonders of the world. The "towers and spires" will not be effaced, but they will no longer be the symbols of a religion which sacrifices earth to heaven and Man to God.

"The extinction of the clerical profession" would certainly take place in a "Faithless World". Those "barriers to thought" would happily have disappeared. Miss Cobbe thinks that this extinction would "reduce by many perceptible degrees the moral level", and that the "severity