Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/317

Rh only a distinction between two kinds of theists. This is what in common controversy it actually is. One might suppose beforehand that the theist and atheist must necessarily have the whole diameter between them, that their thoughts upon all subjects must be affected by this fundamental difference. It is not so in fact; the theist and the so-called atheist often indeed differ very widely, but sometimes also they think very much alike. This is, in reality, because one or other has been misnamed, for, between a real and thoroughly convinced theist and an atheist really deserving that name, there is almost as much difference as we could expect; only the latter character is not very easy to meet with.

An atheist in the proper sense of the word is not a man who disbelieves in the goodness of God, or in his distinctness from Nature, or in his personality. These disbeliefs may be as serious in their way as atheism, but they are different. Atheism is a disbelief in the existence of God—that is, a disbelief in any regularity in the universe to which a man must conform himself under penalties. Such a disbelief, as I have said, is speculatively monstrous, but it may exist practically, and where it does is an evil as fatal to character and virtue as the most timid religionist supposes. We may consider here, briefly, some of the forms which atheism assumes.

The purest form of atheism might be called by the general name of willfulness. All human activity is a transaction with Nature. It is the arrangement of a compromise between what we want on the one hand and what Nature has decreed on the other. Something of our own wishes we have almost always to give up; but by carefully considering the power outside ourselves, the necessity that conditions all our actions, we may make better terms than we could otherwise, and reduce to a minimum what we are obliged to renounce. Now we may either underrate or overrate the force of our own wills. The first is the extravagance of theism; it is that fatalism which steals so naturally upon those who have dwelt much upon the thought of God, which is said to paralyze, for example, the whole soul of the Mussulman. But the opposite mistake is a deficiency of theism; a touch of it often marks the hero, but the fullness of it is that kind of blind infatuation which poets have represented under the image of the giants that tried to storm heaven. Not to recognize any thing but your own will, to fancy every thing within your reach if you only will strongly enough, to acknowledge no superior power outside yourself which must be considered and in some way propitiated if you would succeed in any undertaking—this is complete willfulness, or, in other words, pure atheism. It may also be called childishness, for the child naturally discovers the force within it sooner than the resisting necessity outside. Not without a few falls in the wrestle with Nature do we learn the limits of our own power and the pitiless immensity of the power that is not ours. But there are many who cannot learn this lesson even