it marked the utter unpreparedness of the atheist, who, unable to save
himself by a deathbed repentance, was subsequently roasted through all
eternity in blazing brimstone). It was this disorderliness, this refusal
to obey its own laws of nature, that created a scientific need for its
destruction. Science could stand a cruel and unjust god; for nature was
full of suffering and injustice. But a disorderly god was impossible. In
the Middle Ages a compromise had been made by which two different orders
of truth, religious and scientific, had been recognized, in order that a
schoolman might say that two and two make four without being burnt for
heresy. But the nineteenth century, steeped in a meddling, presumptuous,
reading-and-writing, socially and politically powerful ignorance
inconceivable by Thomas Aquinas or even Roger Bacon, was incapable of
so convenient an arrangement; and science was strangled by bigoted
ignoramuses claiming infallibility for their interpretation of the
Bible, which was regarded, not as a literature nor even as a book, but
partly as an oracle which answered and settled all questions, and partly
as a talisman to be carried by soldiers in their breast pockets or
placed under the pillows of persons who were afraid of ghosts. The tract
shops exhibited in their windows bullet-dinted testaments, mothers'
gifts to their soldier sons whose lives had been saved by it; for the
muzzle-loaders of those days could not drive a projectile through so
many pages.


THE MOMENT AND THE MAN

This superstition of a continual capricious disorder in nature, of a
lawgiver who was also a lawbreaker, made atheists in all directions
among clever and lightminded people. But atheism did not account for
Paley's watch. Atheism accounted for nothing; and it was the business of