from experience, who forget every defeat they suffer, and always refuse to see any power in the universe but their own wills. Sometimes, indeed, they discover their mistake too late. Many barbarous races are in this condition. In their childishness they have engaged themselves in a direct conflict with Nature. Instead of negotiating with her, they have declared a blind war. They have adopted habits which they gradually discover to be leading them to destruction; but they discover it too late and when they are too deeply compromised. Then we see the despair of the atheistic nation, and its wild struggles as it feels itself caught in the whirlpool; then, a little later, we find that no such nation exists, and on the map its seat begins to be covered with names belonging to another language. Less extreme and unredeemed, the same Titanism may sometimes be remarked in races called civilized. Races might be named that are undergoing punishments little less severe for this insensate atheism. "Sedet æternumque sedebit," that unhappy Poland, not indeed extinguished but partitioned, and every thirty years decimated anew. She expiates the crime of atheistic willfulness, the fatal pleasure of unbounded individual liberty, which rose up against the very nature of things. And other nations we know that expect all successes from the mere blind fury of willing, that declare the word impossible unknown to their language. They color their infatuation sometimes with the name of self-sacrifice, and fancy they can change the Divine laws by offering up themselves as victims to their own vanity; they "fling themselves against the bars of fate;" they die in theatrical attitudes, and little know how "the abyss is wreathed in scorn" of such cheap martyrdom.
A wrong belief about God, however fatal it may be, is not atheism. Ml*. Buckle tried to show that the Spanish empire fell through a false conception of the order of the universe; and it seems clear that the rigid Catholic view of the world is dangerous in this age to every nation that adopts it. These are the effects of false theology. But there is a state of mind which, though very far removed from the willfulness I have been describing, and often accompanied with a strong and anxious religiousness, may nevertheless be practically regarded as a form of atheism. It is the state of those minds which, fully believing in an order of the universe, yet have such a poor and paltry conception of it that they might almost as well have none at all.
People are sometimes led to this by a very reasonable and excusable process of thought. Naturally modest and distrustful of their own powers, they despair of understanding the order of the universe; they think it almost presumptuous to attempt to understand it. Wisely distrustful of any knowledge that is not precise, they avert their eyes instinctively from every thing which cannot be made the subject of such knowledge. In all their transactions with Nature, to use my former phrase, they make it a rule to be unambitious. They aim at objects very definite and very near. Whatever they gain they
