him. In his adoration of what
he recognized as living, he retained no reverence for the ossified
experience of past ages. The principle of evolution, which forms a
saving link between the obsolete and the organically vital, had no place
in his logic. The spirit of the French Revolution, uncompromising,
shattering, eager to build in a day the structure which long centuries
of growth must fashion, was still fresh upon him. We who have survived
the enthusiasm of that epoch, who are exhausted with its passions, and
who have suffered from its reactive impulses, can scarcely comprehend
the vivid faith and young-eyed joy of aspiration which sustained Shelley
in his flight toward the region of impossible ideals. For he had a vital
faith; and this faith made the ideals he conceived seem possible--faith
in the duty and desirability of overthrowing idols; faith in the gospel
of liberty, fraternity, equality; faith in the divine beauty of nature;
faith in a love that rules the universe; faith in the perfectibility of
man; faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our souls are atoms; faith
in affection as the ruling and co-ordinating substance of morality. The
man who lived by this faith was in no vulgar sense of the word an
Atheist. When he proclaimed himself to be one, he pronounced his hatred
of a gloomy religion, which had been the instrument of kings and priests
for the enslavement of their fellow-creatures. As he told his friend
Trelawny, he used the word Atheism "to express his abhorrence of
superstition; he took it up as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance
of injustice." But Shelley believed too much to be consistently
agnostic. He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion--a
kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God
because it was all God--that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy
accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break
through and flood the world with beauty. Shelley can only be called an
Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received
conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of
cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was
an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving
the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless
utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual
heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love,