ntilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
toil."[23]

This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
have no putting off of just