e than
those of the _Enquirer_, if a good deal thinner in matter. They avoid
political themes, but the idea of human perfectibility none the less
pervades the book with an unaggressive presence, a cold and wintry sun.
One curious trait of his more cautious and conservative later mind is
worth noting. When he wrote _Political Justice_, the horizons of science
were unlimited, the vistas of discovery endless. Now he questions even
the mathematical data of astronomy, talks of the limitations of our
faculties, and applauds a positive attitude that refrains from
conjecture. His last years were spent in writing a book in which he
ventured at length to state his views upon religion. Like Helvetius he
perceived the advantages which an unpopular philosopher may derive from
posthumous publication. Freed at last from the vulgar worries of debt
and the tragical burden of personal ties, the fighting ended which had
never brought him the joy of combat, the material struggle over which
had issued in defeat, he became again the thing that was himself, a
luminous intelligence, a humane thinker.

With eighty years of life behind him, and doubting whether the curtain
of death concealed a secret, Godwin tranquilly faced extinction in
April, 1836.

* * * * *

"To do my part to free the human mind from slavery," that in his own
words was the main object of Godwin's life. The task was not fully
discharged with the writing of _Political Justice_. He could never
forget the terror and gloom of his own early years, and, like all the
thinkers of the revolution, he coupled superstition with despotism and
priests with kings as the arch-enemies of human liberty. The terrors of
eternal punishment, the firmly riveted chains of Calvinistic logic, had
fettered his own growing mind in youth; and to the end he thought of
traditional religion as the chief of those factitious things which
prevent mankind from reaching the full stature to which nature destined
it. Paine had attempted this work from a similar standpoint, but Godwin,
with his trained speculative mind, and his ideal of courtesy and
persuasiveness in argument, thought meanly (as a private letter shows)
of his friend's polemics. It was an unlucky timidity which caused Mrs.
Shelley to suppress her father's religious essays when the manuscript
was bequeathed to her for publication on his death. When, at length,
they appeared in 1873 (_Essays never before Published_),