and
thought and endurance, his birthright of happiness and dignity. Humanity
is to take the place of God.

It has been argued that if Shelley had lived he would have repented
the "indiscretions of his youth," and gravitated towards a more
"respectable" philosophy. Well, it is easy to prophesy; and just
as easy, and no less effectual, to meet the prophet with a flat
contradiction. "Might have been" is no better than "might not have
been." Was it not declared that Charles Bradlaugh would have become a
Christian if he had lived long enough? Was not the same asserted of John
Stuart Mill? One was nearly sixty, the other nearly seventy; and we
have to wonder what is the real age of intellectual maturity. Only a
few weeks before his death, Shelley wrote of Christianity that "no man of
sense could think it true." That was his deliberate and final judgment.
Had he lived long enough to lose his sense; had he fallen a victim to
some nervous malady, or softening of the brain; had he lingered on to
a more than ripe (a rotten) old age, in which senility may unsay the
virile words of manhood; it is conceivable that Shelley might have
become a devotee of the faith he had despised. But none of these things
did happen. What Shelley _was_ is the only object of sane discussion.
And what he was we know--an Atheist, a lover of Humanity.

LONG FACES.

Every one who has turned over old volumes of sermons, adorned with
the authors' portraits, must have been struck with the length of their
faces. They seem to say--parodying the famous line of Dante--"Abandon
jokes all ye who enter here." Those men preached a solemnly absurd
creed, and they looked absurdly solemn. Their faces seemed as devoid of
merriment as the faces of jackasses, and the heads above them were often
as stupid. Justice forbid that I should run down a Hooker, a Barrow, a
Taylor, or a South. They were men of _genius_, and all genius is of the
blood royal. I read their writings with pleasure and profit, which
is more than nine-tenths of the clergy can say with any approach to
honesty. But a single swallow does not make a summer, and a few men of
genius do not elevate a profession. I am perfectly convinced that
the great bulk of the preaching fraternity have cultivated a solemn
aspect--not perhaps deliberately, but at least instinctively--in order
to impose on the ignorant and credulous multitude. The very tone of
voice in which they pray, give out hymns, and preach, is _art