from the influence of which we are not yet, and doubtless never shall
be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later
knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories
of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its
obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can
never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of
human culture which found in him its clearest and sweetest voice, this
earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe
wherein all things were ordained 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