s. He
flung things at him, but all in vain. At last he resolved on desperate
measures. He plucked up his courage, looked the Devil straight in the
face, and laughed at him. That ended the battle. The Devil could not
stand laughter. He fled that moment and never returned.

Superstition is the Devil. Treat him to a hearty wholesome laugh. It is
the surest exorcism, and you will find laughter medicinal for mind and
body too. Ridicule, and again ridicule, and ever ridicule!

WHO ARE THE BLASPHEMERS?

Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot
commit. God is to them merely a word, expressing all sorts of ideas, and
not a person. It is, properly speaking, a general term, which includes
all that there is in common among the various deities of the world. The
idea of the supernatural embodies itself in a thousand ways. Truth is
always simple and the same, but error is infinitely diverse. Jupiter,
Jehovah, and Mumbo-Jumbo are alike creations of human fancy, the
products of ignorance and wonder. Which is _the_ God is not yet settled.
When the sects have decided this point, the question may take a fresh
turn; but until then _god_ must be considered as a generic term, like
_tree_ or _horse or man_; with just this difference, however, that while
the words tree, horse, and man express the general qualities of visible
objects, the word god expresses only the imagined qualities of something
that nobody has ever seen.

When the Atheist examines, denounces, or satirises the gods, he is not
dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God,
for he does not admit the existence of any such being.

Ideas of god may be good or bad, beautiful or ugly; and according as
he finds them the Atheist treats them. If we lived in Turkey, we should
deal with the god of the Koran; but as we live in England, we deal
with the god of the Bible. We speak of that god as a being, just for
convenience sake, and not from conviction. At bottom, we admit nothing
but the mass of contradictory notions between Genesis and Revelation.
We attack not a person but a belief, not a being but an idea, not a fact
but a fancy.

Lord Brougham long ago pointed out, in his _Life of Voltaire_, that
the great French heretic was not guilty of blasphemy, as his enemies
alleged; since he had no belief in the actual existence of tne god he
dissected, analysed, and laughed at. Mr. Ruskin very eloquently defends
Byron from th