the work which
they sought to accomplish had been done by other pens. They possess none
the less an historical interest; some fine pages will always be worth
reading for their humane impulse and their manly eloquence; they help us
to understand the influence which Godwin's ideas, conveyed in personal
intercourse, exerted on the author of _Prometheus Unbound_. There is
little in them which a candid believer would resent to-day. Most of the
dogmas which Godwin assailed have long since crumbled away through the
sapping of a humaner morality and a more historical interpretation of
the Bible.

The book opens with a protest against the theory and practice of
salutary delusions; and Godwin once more pours his scorn upon those who
would cherish their own private freedom, while preserving popular
superstitions, "that the lower ranks may be kept in order." The
foundation of all improvement is that "the whole community should run
the generous race for intellectual and moral superiority." Godwin would
preserve some portion of the religious sense, for we can reach sobriety
and humility only by realising "how frail and insignificant a part we
constitute of the great whole." But the fundamental tenets of dogmatic
Christianity are far, he argues, from being salutary delusions. At the
basis alike of Protestantism and Catholicism, he sees the doctrine of
eternal punishment; and with an iteration that was not superfluous in
his own day, he denounces its cruel and demoralising effects. It saps
the character where it is really believed, and renders the mind which
receives it servile and pusillanimous. The case is no better when it is
neither sincerely believed nor boldly rejected. Such an attitude, which
is, he thinks, that of most professing believers, makes for
insincerity, and for an indifference to all honest thought and
speculation. The man who dare neither believe nor disbelieve is debarred
from thinking at all.

Worst of all, this doctrine of endless torment and arbitrary election
involves a blasphemous denial of the goodness of God. "To say all, then,
in a word, since it must finally be told, the God of the Christians is a
tyrant." He quotes the delightfully naive reflection of Plutarch, who
held that it was better to deny God than to calumniate Him, "for I had
rather it should be said of me, that there was never such a man as
Plutarch, than that it should be said that Plutarch was ill-natured,
arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and i