ned for his sole behoof: the sun to give
him light and warmth, the stars in their courses to preside over his
strangely checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or
the fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the land,--all for the
blessing, or the warning, or the chiding, of the chief among God's
creatures, Man. Upon some such conception as this, indeed, all theology
would seem naturally to rest. Once dethrone Humanity, regard it as a
mere local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical
changes, and you arrive at a doctrine which, under whatever specious
name it may be veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism.
On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in
the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost
inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human
consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of
particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that
Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with
it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward
Atheism goes much deeper than the mere recognition of it as
philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all
like the mood in which we reject the corpuscular theory of light or Sir
G.C. Lewis's vagaries on the subject of Egyptian hieroglyphics. We are
wont to look upon Atheism with unspeakable horror and loathing. Our
moral sense revolts against it no less than our intelligence; and this
is because, on its practical side, Atheism would remove Humanity from
its peculiar position in the world, and make it cast in its lot with the
grass that withers and the beasts that perish; and thus the rich and
varied life of the universe, in all the ages of its wondrous duration,
becomes deprived of any such element of purpose as can make it
intelligible to us or appeal to our moral sympathies and religious
aspirations.

And yet the first result of some of the grandest and most irrefragable
truths of modern science, when newly discovered and dimly comprehended,
has been to make it appear that Humanity must be rudely unseated from
its throne in the world and made to occupy an utterly subordinate and
trivial position; and it is because of this mistaken view of their
import that the Church has so often and so bitterly opposed the teaching
of such truths. With the advent of the Copernican astrono