a flashy sophist."

William Godwin came into the world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen
country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance.
His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the
metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaint
ill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong character, a meagre
education and rigid beliefs. William was unwholesomely precocious as a
boy, pious, studious and greedy for distinction and praise. He was
brought up on the _Account of the Pious Deaths of Many Godly Children_,
and would move his school-fellows to tears by his early sermons on the
Last Judgment. At seventeen we find him, destined for the hereditary
profession, a student in the Theological College at Hoxton. His mental
development was by no means headlong, but he was a laborious reader and
an eager disputant, endowed with all the virtues save modesty.

He emerged from College as he had entered it, a Tory in politics and a
Sandemanian in religion. The Sandemanians were super-Calvinists, and
their tenets may be summarily defined. A Calvinist held that of ten
souls nine will be damned. A Sandemanian hoped that of ten Calvinists
one may with difficulty be saved. In the Calvinist mould Godwin's mind
was formed, and if the doctrine was soon discarded, the habit of
thought characteristic of Calvinism remained with him to the end. It is
a French and not a British creed, Latin in its systematic completeness,
Latin in the logical courage with which it pursues its assumptions to
their last conclusion, Latin in its faith in deductive reasoning and its
disdain alike of experience and of sentiment. Had Godwin been bred a
Methodist or a Churchman, he could not have written _Political Justice_.
To him in these early years religion presented itself as a supernatural
despotism based on terror and coercion. Its central doctrine was eternal
punishment, and when in mature life, Godwin became a free-thinker, his
revolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who has
reconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberal
mind against a system of terrorism. To some agnostics God is an
unnecessary hypothesis. To Godwin He was rather a tyrant to be deposed.
It was a view which Shelley with less provocation adopted with even
greater heat.

Godwin's firm dogmatic creed began to crumble away during his early
experiences as a dissenting minister in cou