nd Moral Government.

But, while the grand parent cause of all Atheism--whether practical or
speculative, dogmatic or skeptical--is to be found in the disordered
state of our own moral nature, there are other subordinate causes in
operation, which may be regarded either as _incidental occasions_, or as
_plausible pretexts_, for this form of unbelief. The internal causes are
the primary and most powerful; but there are external influences which
cooeperate with these, and serve to stimulate and strengthen them. Among
the incidental occasions of Atheism, we might mention a defective,
because irreligious, education in early life, the influence of ungodly
example and profane converse, and the authority of a few great names in
literature or science which have become associated with the cause of
Infidelity; and among the plausible pretexts for Atheism we might
mention the inconsistencies of professed believers and especially of the
clergy, the divided state of the religious world, as indicated by the
multiplicity of sects, the bitterness of religious controversy, the
supposed opposition of the Church to the progress of science and the
extension of civil and religious liberty, and the gross superstitions
which have been incorporated with Christianity itself in some of the
oldest and most powerful states of Europe. These and similar topics may
be justly said to be the "loci communes of Atheism," and they are often
employed in eloquent declamation or indignant invective, so as to make a
much deeper impression, especially on young and ardent minds, than their
intrinsic weight or real argumentative value can either justify or
explain. Infidel writers have not been slow to avail themselves of these
pretexts for unbelief, in regard alike to Natural and Revealed Religion;
and have artfully identified Religion with Superstition, and
Christianity with Popery, as if there were no consistent or tenable
medium between the two. And, perhaps, of all the incidental occasions or
external inducements to Atheism, none has exerted so much influence over
reflecting minds as the wide-spread prevalence of Superstition; for
never was Atheism more general among the cultivated classes in ancient
times than in the States of Greece, whose hospitable Pantheon enclosed
the gods of all nations, and whose inhabitants were "exceedingly given
to idolatry;" and nowhere, in modern times, has Atheism been more
explicitly avowed or more zealously propagated than in