Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/188

172 ready to seize every opportunity to do good and to promote the cause of freedom. He was, in a word, one of that large army of pilgrims whose ambition is to "make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight." In 1791 he wrote an anonymous letter to Fox, in which he explained at once the two leading doctrines of his philosophy: the necessity of change, and the equal importance of moderation in effecting it. His political creed was, paradoxical as this may seem, the outcome of his religious education. He had long since given up the actual faith in which he was born and trained; after going through successive stages of Sandemanianism, Deism, and Socinianism, he had, in 1787, become a "complete unbeliever"; but he never entirely outlived its influence. This was of a twofold nature. It taught him to question the sanctity of established institutions, and it crushed in him, even if it did not wholly eradicate, strong passion and emotional demonstration. No man in England was as thorough a Radical as he; after he ceased to be a religious, he became a political and social dissenter. In his zeal for the liberty of humanity, he contended for nothing less than the destruction of all human laws. French Republicans demanded the simplest possible form of Government. But Godwin, outstripping them, declared there should be none whatsoever. "It may seem strange," Mrs. Shelley writes, "that anyone should, in the sincerity of his heart, believe that no vice could exist with perfect freedom, but my father did; it was the very basis of his system, the very key-stone of the arch of justice, by which he desired to knit together the whole human family."

His ultra-radicalism led him to some new and