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human trust does not create God, and that human distrust would not annihilate Him. There is a thoroughly atheistic way of shuddering over Atheism, which is apt to express itself as if the spread of human disbelief would not only overcloud but empty Heaven. Although the darkness which we have supposed would hide God from us, it would not hide us from God; nor should we ever be beyond the reach of His moral influence. When people assume that an atheist must "live without God in the world," they assume what is fatal to their own Theism. We deeply believe that by far the greater part of all human trust does not arise, as is commonly supposed, from our seeking God, but from God's seeking us; and this, too, without any clear admission or confession on our part of His influence upon us ;-that a great deal of it is trust in goodness rather than in any personal God, and might possibly be held along with intellectual disbelief of His personal existence; in short, that if you could blot out on the one hand all acts of self-confessed trust in God,-if you could blot out all private and public worship, properly so called, spurious or genuine, all churches, all creeds, all pharisaism, and all pure conscious devotion; and if, on the other hand, you might leave all this, and blot out of the earth all unconscious and unconfessed acts of surrender to the divine influence in the heart, all that might possibly be connected with purely intellectual Atheism,-you would blot out more of true "religion," more of that which "binds together" human society, more of God's true agency on the earth, in the latter case than in the former. Of course we do not mean that the truest unconscious trust in God's influence is not generally to be found in the same minds which, at other times, also consciously confess Him; but only this, that if in every life, whether of faith or doubt, you numbered up the acts of trust which are not rendered to God personally, but to the instincts and impulses which so often represent Him in the heart, and which might continue to represent Him even when the dark cloud of conscious doubt of His existence had intervened, you would probably have numbered far more acts which really originate in divine influence than could possibly be found animated by a real conscious personal belief.

And if this be so, as we believe most men will admit as much from self-knowledge as from knowledge of the world, it is a fatal blunder to attempt to prove to the atheist that, in consequence of his doubt, he has been and is living totally without God; that his eyes need opening, not in order that they may recognise One who has been ever with him, but that they may help him to find a distant and alienated power. There is no teaching more mis

chievous in its effects than that which makes human belief in God

the first regenerating power in human society, and God Himself the second; which makes God's blessing a consequence of man's confession, and which therefore limits that blessing to the narrow bounds of the confession. In fact, this delusion tends to depress rather than to exaggerate ordinary men's real estimate of the value of faith. Hearing it constantly implied that God influences men's hearts only so far as they confess His influence, that He will do nothing for them, morally and spiritually, unless they render the "glory" where it is due; and yet, seeing that in fact this sine quâ non of divine influence is any thing but a true mark of actual goodness, being often only the crowning element in evil, a school of thought has sprung up which depreciates the value of faith altogether, which delights in discovering that the greatest good is, after all, to be found hidden under a mask of scepticism and self-mockery, in short, a school which replaces the religious ascription of all goodness to God's grace by light ridicule of a human nature that does not pretend to be so assisted, but rather does the best it can for itself in an unostentatious way. This disposition to compare keen self-mockery with formal belief, and to give the preference to the former, is perceptible enough in the whole tone of our literature. Thackeray's writings are throughout tinged with the feeling that thorough self-distrust is one of the highest moral virtues of which men in general are capable. And until even this honest self-exposure, and every other sort of goodness, so far as it is goodness, be shown to be attributable to God's Spirit working in man, far though it be removed from the theological virtue of faith, faith itself will never recover from the discredit into which its undue isolation has brought it. As soon as God is confessed to be far greater than our faith, we shall begin to make the effort to render our faith more worthy of God: but while men own so many things to be noble which are never claimed as divine because they are unaccompanied by this conscious faith, so long they will care little what that faith does or does not include. Men have found the faith-classification of human actions so narrow and unjust, they have seen so much goodness without faith, and so much faith without goodness, that they begin to preach justification by sincerity as a more human, if it is not a more divine formula than justification by faith.

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In showing, then, that Atheism is false to human nature, trust in God is the natural atmosphere of our moral life, we must not take for granted, as is so often done, that belief in God as God, and belief in goodness, are one and the same thing. We must grant the atheist his unexplained impulses to good, the implicit God of his conscience, and show how he mutilates and dwarfs human nature by denying it all explained impulses

to good, the explicit God of faith. Though guarding against the error that an acknowledgment of God must accompany all virtual obedience to His word, it is of course manifest that, so far as human action is self-conscious as well as voluntary, blindness to God's existence must entail a large and constant loss upon the blind. Although other and deeper springs of divine influence be not closed, although there may be yet (except in the cases in which intellectual atheism is the dullness produced by moral atheism) far more effectual means of inward guidance still accessible to God's providence than those which any deadness of insight can obstruct, yet all the tone of the reflective life must be greatly changed by the exclusion of this great object from the field of the inward vision. Not to see what exists must of course modify constantly the whole range of action and thought which has a real (though in this case unperceived) reference to that existence. As our ancestors, who did not know that air had weight, reaped unconsciously most of the benefits of the all-permeating atmospheric pressure, but of course lost that which depended on the actual recognition and conscious use of its weight, so those who do not know that God is, while they experience, as much as any, most of the blessing of His existence and His character, cannot have the blessing which arises only from a knowledge and conscious account of the fact of that existence and character; and therefore it is, we believe, that, in proportion as mental culture increases the horizon of man's experience, and reduces more and more of his life beneath the eye of his thought, is the moral loss serious and deep which arises from this mental blindness. Those who have but little inward life, whose busy routine of occupation, or natural one-sidedness of character, leaves room only for a narrow moral horizon, suffer indeed and bitterly from blindness to the only great and tranquillising reality of life, but not at all in the same proportion as those whose whole nature is awake and sensitive to human emotions, without including the belief in God. Of all merely intellectual atheisms, hard material atheisms betray least strikingly and painfully the absence of the power of faith. There are so many natural obstructions in such minds to the propagation of religious conviction throughout the whole nature, that its absence is not striking; there would be so many clouds as to hide the sun even if it were up. But thoroughly cultivated and refined atheisms are always intensely startling and painful, like the blotting of the sun out of a clear sky. The actual loss is greater; proportionally far more of God's influence would naturally come through conscious channels with the cultivated than with the uncultivated man; proportionally less strength and warmth can be received unconsciously from "behind the veil."

Let us first of all look steadily at the startling fact which meets us on the threshold of this question-the fact, namely, that it is so much as possible for a sincere truth-loving mind to doubt of God's existence-that the greatest of all realities appears so frequently, in the history of nations as well as in individual life, rather in the shape of a whispered haunting suggestion than as an unveiled illumined truth. Can any answer be found to the argument: "You tell us that this faith is the one pure spring of all the conscious purity and strength to which human nature has access. Why, then, is it at best a faith, and not a conspicuous fact? Why can it ever, even for a time, be inaccessible to eager search? And why, when attained, does it still linger in the background of your mind, as it were, being usually, even to yourselves, more audible than heard ?" The common and dreary answer is, of course, the mists of human corruption. But it seems strange that the very remedy which is to heal the blindness should be applicable only when the blindness is already healed. We deeply believe, too, that this question is not explicable by the doctrine of Dr. Newman and others that trust is made a kind of probationary venture of the will-a courageous risk of ourselves by a dim twilight-in order to test whether we would not rather serve even a probable God than a certain self-love. We do not deny that we ought to do so, if it were possible for Him thus to experimentalise upon us; but it seems to us that it is a most unworthy representation of the divine character to represent Him as tempting us by self-concealment. Probably the account which most true men would give to themselves of the mystery is this: that while faith fosters, sight must arrest, the growth of a moral nature constituted like ours,-nay, that there may even be peculiar stages of individual and social life when the absence of faith alleviates instead of aggravating the pressure of moral evil. We believe that a constant vision of God would be an injury to almost all men,—that there are periods when even utter scepticism is the sign of God's mercy, and the necessary condition of moral restoration. We believe a real independent moral growth would be impossible to natures that had not been shaded, as it were, by a special veil from the overwhelming brightness of a divine character ever present with us. Either every thing human must have been changed, so as to make us impervious to personal influences, or there must be a special film to screen from our sensitive passive nature, at least during the growth of our character, the intense impressions emanating from any spiritual beings greatly superior to ourselves. Every one knows that, even amongst men, a powerful massive character, though it be nearly perfect, often positively injures those within the circle of its influence. They lose the

spring of their mind beneath the overwhelming weight of its constant pressure. They are crushed into an unconscious mechanical consonance with all its ways. Nay, even affection, not pressure, may do the same thing. Moral preference, moral freedom, moral character, may be superseded altogether by the single unanalysed predominance of another's wish. This it was probably which rendered the removal of Christ the first condition of the moral life of the apostles. "It is expedient for you that I go away." In the case supposed we should lose the power of growing up to be "fellow-workers" with God from mere unmoral captivity to His infinite influence. Faith means the discernment of His character without subjugation of the small finite personality to the infinite life. To exchange faith for sight on earth, would be to exchange Theism for Pantheism-moral education for moral absorption. Again, we think it true, for an inverse reason, that there are stages in human culture when even utter scepticism may be a divine remedy for moral evil. When civilisation has become corrupt, and men are living consciously below their faith, we believe that it is in mercy that God strikes the nations with blindness,— that the only hope of remedy lies in thus taking away an influence they resist, and leaving them to learn the stern lesson of helpless self-dependence. The shock of a lost faith often restores sooner than the reproach of a neglected faith. Nay, often before any real faith can be attained at all, scepticism may be, we believe, a discipline of mind and heart, given not in retribution but in love. The painful groping of an uncertain footing amidst immortal wants and affections is often the only means by which, as far as we can see, we could have our eyes opened at once to their infinite truth and to our own responsibility.

It is in growing characters, maturing in the culture of all the finer elements, as well as in mere intellect, that scepticism seems most evil in its influences-characters needing the genial influence of trust, and yet held fast in some of the many intellectual traps of human speculation. In other cases it cannot be regarded as unmixed evil. But, as we have said, in refined and cultured minds there is, we believe, no influence that can secure constant progress apart from personal trust; and long-continued doubt, whether arising from personal unfaithfulness or from evil influence, must in the end ossify the higher parts of the mind and distort the whole.

What, then, is the atheistic type of character? In other words, what is the type of character which a fully realised disbelief in the existence and influence over us of any spiritual nature higher than our own (however faithfully our own may be accepted and trusted) tends to produce? Vividly to see the import of Atheism to human character, even though it be not moral

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