Page:A World Without God.pdf/3



Roman Catholic conception of a world over which God is supreme and which is ruled under him by his Church, all authority flowing from that one fount, all duty owing to that one superior, is a logical and a consistent one; the Atheistic conception of a world of which man is the highest product and over which he rules, knowing no superior, and acknowledging no limit to his own rights save the collateral rights of those who share the planet with him, is a logical and a consistent one. On many points of duty the obligation imposed by authority and that deduced from experience will coincide, but the bases of the two schools remain entirely distinct. Between these reasoned and opposing systems float and drift many semi-rational and more or less inconsequent schools—Protestants orthodox and unorthodox, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregational, Unitarian, Theistic, &c., &c.—each of which has partially thrown off authority, here of Rome, there of Canterbury, here of a Kirk, there of a Book, but each of which claims authority for its own remnant of belief; each affirms the right of private judgment over all it rejects, but denies it for all it receives: and often the denial is the more bitter and the more unsparing as the assertion has been wide and sweeping.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe in an article in the Contemporary Review on "A Faithless World", and her critics in various religious journals, offer instructive examples of these varying semi-rational schools; herself a Theist and erstwhile at least an opponent of Christianity, she declares that the effects of Atheism in the future cannot be judged by the conduct of Atheists now, because Atheists are