ates of reason, and resigned himself to the dominion of
evil passions; and when, with these convictions and feelings, he is
asked to conceive of God as a living, personal Being, everywhere
present, beholding the evil and the good, whose "eyes are as a flame of
fire," and can discern "the very thoughts and intents of the heart;"
when he conceives of such a Being as his Lawgiver, Governor, and Judge,
as one who demands the homage of the heart and the obedience of the
life, and who has power to enforce His rightful claims by the sanctions
of reward and punishment, he will be sensible, in the first instance, of
an instinctive disposition to recoil from the contemplation of his
character, and a strong desire to deny, or at least to forget, His
claims; and just in proportion as the idea of God becomes more vivid, or
is more frequently presented to his mind, it will become the more
intolerable, insomuch that he will be tempted either to banish the
subject altogether from his thoughts, or, if he cannot succeed in this,
to alter and modify his view of the Divine character so as to bring it
into accordance with his own wishes, and to obtain some relief from the
fears and forebodings which it would otherwise awaken in his mind. If he
should succeed in this attempt, he will fall into one or other of two
opposite states of mind, which, however apparently different, do
nevertheless spring from the same latent source,--a state _of security_,
or a state of _servitude_. In the former, he either forgets God
altogether,--"God is not in all his thoughts;" or he conceives of Him as
"one like unto himself," indulgent to sin, and neither strict to mark
nor just to punish it: in the latter, he either "remembers God and is
troubled," or, if he would allay the remorse and forebodings of an
uneasy conscience, he has recourse to penance and mortification, to
painful sacrifices and ritual observances, in the hope, that by these he
may propitiate an offended Deity. In the one case, the conflict ends in
practical Atheism, in the other, in abject Superstition. And these two,
Atheism and Superstition, however different and even opposite they may
seem to be, are really offshoots from the same corrupt root,--"the evil
heart of unbelief which departeth from the living God." In the case of
the great majority of mankind, who are little addicted to speculative
inquiry, or to serious thought of any kind, it may be safely affirmed
that, in the absence of Revelat