LECTURE III.

ATHEISM AND THEISM DEFINED AND COMPARED.

The treatment of our present subject, nor that exclusively, is intended to be characterized by the strictest candor and courtesy, that its peculiar character will admit: And that facts, also, whenever they can be made available, shall be employed with entire impartiality, without distortion or misrepresentation: And if hypothesis shall be, sometimes, unavoidable, as upon most of our occasions it doubtless will, its admission shall be upon that principle only; and whenever adopted, shall not only have undergone my own careful scrutiny, but will be exposed to that of the Public, to be adjudged by its comparative plausibility.

I am well aware of the delicacy, not to say the danger, of my position with the orthodox community. wherein I live; nor less so, of the disparity between my personal effeminacy, and the gigantic burthen, I have assumed to carry.

It is an adage of the olden time, that an ass loaded with gold can effect his entrance without difficulty,

into the strongest city. But then, how boisterous the hue and cry, Suspicion would excite, against the unwelcome visitor, were his load mistaken for infection of the plague. Yes, although it should be transported by Apis or a demigod. No matter whether it be fool or knave, that caters for our factitious pleasures; he is flattered and cherished, just so long as he cheerfully ministers to our vanity and licentiousness. And though he were the literal adversary of human weal, whilst he should carefully humor our foibles, and good-naturedly assent to our fallacies, he may safely insinuate himself into our very vitals, and deliberately gnaw himself out again, not merely with impunity, but with commendation. But let an angel, a demigod, or a prodigy of human wisdom, suggest a fallacy in our present notions, or an evil in our present habits, he is taunted with his folly, or condemned for his impudence. His name is heretic, and he is denounced as a blasphemer. Persecution lays her leaden hand upon his enterprise, and Superstition fattens upon the spoil. His life is verily a prologue to that spiritual perdition, to which Bigotry has triumphantly assigned him.

Atheism is a term derived from the Greek, and means, in its strict interpretation, without God. Its more general and later acceptation has been however, without a belief of God-and more recently, a direct denial of the existence of God. Admitting that mankind have almost always, and almost everywhere, believed in the existence of a God, and mostly in a multiplicity of them, it must strike the superficial ob

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server with a good deal of surprise, that there should be a single atheist in the world, unless he were either an idiot or a lunatic. And this, in its only proper acceptation, is most emphatically true: For whoever has sufficient intellect, to contemplate the simplest relations of cause and effect, cannot, in any rational interpretation of the epithet, be denominated an atheist: He will have acquired a belief of either theism or polytheism of one God, or of many gods. The states of natural, and social, infancy, therefore, must be allowed to be most congenial with old fashioned atheism; unless it shall be satisfactorily ascertained, that the idea of God is instinctive, or connate; and, consequently, not acquired by reflection, or induction.

Since it is undeniable, that the idea of a God was early excited, and has almost universally prevailed among mankind, even to the present time, the first question to be interpreted is, whence and wherefore has such an idea occurred?

That the idea of God is not intuitive, instinctive, or possessed at birth, appears to be more than probable, from the consideration, that children appear nevér to have acquired it, except in the ordinary course of infantile education; and of which they demand the same particular explanation, as of any other subject of human inquiry. It is, therefore, a plausible hypothesis, that this idea was originally the product of reflection; and, when fairly analyzed, will be found to be identical with undefinable causality. And there seems to be no other possible method of solving the problem, whence and wherefore, the idea of a God,

whether supreme or subordinate; ultimate causality being identical with the former, and indefinite, secondary causality with the latter.

So entirely inadequate is human apprehension to trace the principle of causality to its ultimatum, that, upon many subjects, the profoundest philosophy is but a single step in advance of primitive barbarism, And the following is offered, in explication of our proposition.

The eye of a savage lights upon a watch, that casualty has dropped in his path: He views it with a suspicion, and approaches it with a cautiousness peculiar to his race: He ventures not to touch it; but, with a stick some yard in length, he moves it to and fro, until he perceives it to have neither teeth nor claws. He ventures then, though warily, to touch it with a finger-then with another; and finally to take it from the ground, as a most wonderful living specimen of creative power, whose origin, he most devoutly and reverently, refers to Manatou, or him who made the Indian. Here the philosopher smiles, contemptuously, in his cultivated egotism, at the childish simplicity of this native forester, who sees, or thinks he sees, a God, in human mechanism; and, in boastful confidence, exclaims, that he can trace this very watch to man's contrivance, and the manipulation of human fingers. But ask him how contrivance and those fingers came.-How humbled is his pride of learning, when he finds himself, so soon, obliged to ape the savage in his answer! A single step has found him kneeling to the Indian's Manatou, by the

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name of God, in shuffling apology for his own imbe→ cility. In this example, we discover not only the slight difference between the lowest barbarism and the highest cultivation; but that the idea of God is the same, with the whole human race, and identical with supposed ultimate causality. For we see that, because the savage was ignorant of the degree of human ingenuity, required for the construction of a watch, he referred it to the same power, or principle of causation, that produced himself—that is, one of which he was totally ignorant. And although the philosopher escapes the absurdity of expending his veneration upon a human mechanic, under the idea of God; what more does he know of the origin of man, than the savage, viz., that he must have been the product of some antecedent cause; which cause however seems to be altogether beyond the precinct of human scrutiny; and hence his veneration is at length, like that of the savage, expended upon unknown causality. It seems therefore plausible, at least, that the idea of God the creator is identical with that of ultimate causality, by whatever epithet it may have been distinguished; and is the only theological one, in which all mankind, both savage and civilized, ignorant and learned, have been found, unanimously, to agree. For it is undeniable, that the attributes appropriated to this God, by different persons and nations, have been as various and dissonant, as have been the states of human science, morals and opinion: And like every other department of intellectual enterprise, have been progressively modi