Page:A World Without God.pdf/9

 of argument apply to Miss Cobbe's Theism. Who can plumb the depths of immorality which will be reached by adherents of "mere Theism", when the constraining influence of Christianity has disappeared? All their present parade of virtue is worthless; "full-blooded Theism" is as far off as "full-blooded Atheism". Theists are virtuous members of society, not because they love virtue, but because they are forced into outward decency by their ancestral "forty generations of Christians", and the pressure of Christianity around them. Miss Cobbe's Theism and my Atheism are both products of modern thought. Her arguments against the morality of the one tell with fatal force against the morality of the other. Let Miss Cobbe go back to submissive Christianity, or let her be honest enough to recognise that in seeking a higher truth both she and I have broken with the past, and that while we both owe much to our forerunners, our morality is based on something more reliable than tradition or present pressure.

"As it is, then, impossible", Miss Cobbe goes on, "to forecast what would be the consequences of universal Atheism hereafter by observing the conduct of individual Atheists to-day, all that can be done is to study bit by bit the changes which must take place should this planet ever become, as is threatened, a Faithless World". Surely the word "study" is here written in error? To "guess at", to "fancy", to "manufacture", would represent the process, but to study, no! Anyone who desired to write carefully would at least have endeavored in forecasting changes to be guided by some analogy with observed facts, but Miss Cobbe deliberately ignores all the admitted facts, and starts off along a road of pure guess.

Miss Cobbe's bitter contempt for the philosophy she is engaged in caricaturing, and her habit of begging every point in dispute, break out in her next sentences. "Atheists have been hitherto like children playing at the mouth of a cavern of unknown depth. They have run in and out, and explored it a little way, but always within sight of the daylight outside, where have stood their parents and friends calling on them to return. Not till the way back to the sunshine has been lost will the darkness of that cave be fully revealed." I pass the "children playing". In serious controversy such phrases are out of place. But it is well to note the cool assumption that Atheism is