him study it in this light. What is his attitude? When he comes to speak
of the tendency of the age he will indulge in vague generalities about
atheism, socialism, irreligion, and the rest; always the cause is
outside of him, and against him; he is not part of it. I ask him to pass
by the atheist awhile and take what may be of more concern. There is a
type of Catholic and Protestant who has as little genuine religion in
him as any infidel, who does not deny the letter of the law, but who
does not observe its spirit, whose only use for the letter is to
criticise and harass adversaries. Observe the high use he has for
liberty--drinking, card-playing, gambling, luxury; he has no place in
his life for any worthy deeds, nay, only scorn for such. Still he passes
for orthodox. If he is a Catholic, he secures that by putting in an
appearance at Mass on Sundays. His mind is not there; he arrives late
and goes early. His Protestant fellow in his private judgment finds more
scope: "Let the women go listen to the parson." This is the sort of
saying gives him such a conceit of himself. We have the type on both
sides, so all can see it. Now it is not in the way of the Pharisee we
come to note them, but to note that, strange as it may appear, either or
both together will come to applaud the denouncing of the atheist. We
gather such into our religious societies, and flatter them that they are
adherents of religion and the bulwark of the faith, and they forthwith
anathematise the atheist with great gusto. The one so anathematised is
often as worthless as themselves with a conceit to despise priest and
parson alike. But it sometimes happens he is a fine character who has no
religion as most of us understand it, but who has yet a fine spiritual
fervour, ready to fight and make sacrifices for a national or social
principle that he believes will make for better things, a man of
integrity and worth whom the best of men may be glad to hold as a
friend. Yet we find in the condition to which we have drifted such a one
may be pilloried by wasters, gamblers, rioters, a crew that are the
curse of every community. We lash the atheist and the age but give
little heed to the insincerity and cant of those we do not refuse to
call our own. What an example for the man anathematised. He sees the
vice and meanness of those we allow to pass for orthodox, and when he
sees also the complacency of the better part, he is unconvinced. We
praise the sweetness of