LONDON:
J. WATSON, 5, PAUL'S ALLEY, PATERNOSTER ROW.
AND ALL BOOKSELLERS.

1846





AN APOLOGY FOR ATHEISM


It would be absurd to doubt that religion has an important bearing on
all the relations and conditions of life. The connexion between
religions faith and political practice is, in truth, far closer than is
generally thought. Public opinion has not ripened into a knowledge that
religious error is the intangible but real substratum of all political
injustice. Though the 'schoolmaster' has done much, there still remain
and hold some away among us, many honest and energetic assertors of 'the
rights of man,' who have to learn that a people in the fetters of
superstition, can never achieve political freedom. Many of these
reformers admit the vast, the incalculable influence of Mahommedanism on
the politics of Constantinople, and yet persist in acting as if
Christianity had little or nothing to do with the politics of England.

At a recent meeting of the Anti-State Church Association it was
remarked, that 'throw what we would into the political cauldron, out it
came in an ecclesiastical shape'. If the newspaper report may be relied
on, there was much laughing among the hearers of those words, the deep