cause it is what is most denied. As their own belief ebbs away from them, they are precluded from learning a new one, because they are too deeply pledged, have promised too much, asseverated too much, and involved too many others with themselves. Thus their language becomes more and more vehement and hollow, more and more despairing under the mask of triumphant confidence. It may happen that the cause they defend is not merely unsound, but terribly bad, that what they have taken for sacred institutions are in reality monstrous abuses. Then, as they become reluctantly enlightened, as their advocacy grows first a little forced, then by degrees consciously hypocritical, until in the end their eyes are fully opened not only to the fact that their cause is bad, but, to all the enormous badness of it, there follows a complete moral dissolution of the whole man. Unable to abandon a position he is bound to, forced to act belief and enthusiasm when under the mask there is the very opposite of both—settled disbelief and utter disapproval—the man sees now in the universe nothing but a chaos. At the beginning he had a God; his actions were regulated by a law which he recognized in the universe; but now he recognizes this law no more, and yet is forbidden by his situation from recognizing any other. The link that bound him to the universe is snapped; the motive that inspired his actions is gone, and his actions have become meaningless, mechanical, galvanic. He is an atheist, a man without a God because without a law. Such men may generally be noted among the most intelligent adherents of expiring causes, demoralized soldiers, powerless for good and capable of any mischief.
These are specimens of what seems to me to be properly called atheism. The common characteristic of all these states of mind is feebleness. In the first example you have violent feebleness, impotence; in the second, cautious feebleness; in the third, cynical feebleness; but in all cases feebleness springing from a conscious want of any clew to the order of the universe. The specimens I have selected are all such as may be furnished by men of great natural vigor. The cynical atheist has often an extreme subtilty of intellect, the Philistine commonly begins with a great grasp of reality, a great superiority to illusions; the willful atheist has often much imagination and energy. Where a character wanting in energy is infected by atheism, you have those αμένηνα κᾴρηνα of which the world is at all times full. By the side of the profound cynic you have the mere lounger, who can take an interest in nothing, all whose thoughts are hearsays, never verified, never realized, not believed, not worthy of the name of prejudices—echoes of prejudices, imitations of hypocrisy. He moves about embarrassed and paralyzed by the hollowness of all he knows; conscious that nothing that he has in his mind would bear the smallest criticism or probation, knowing no way to any thing better, and meanwhile ingenuously confessing his own inanity. By the side of the over-judicious Philistine, who has fallen into feebleness through an excessive dread of general-
