who, like us older men, have already passed through the saddest and sorest of human experiences-the loss of one or both of their parents. Does that, think you, end the relationship? God forbid! It does but seal and crown and immortalise it. Yes, we have still to honour the father and mother departed-still to feel them near us in our going out and coming in-still to give thanks for them in the prayer for the Church militant. Let your "home relations" take in the dead; it shall give sweetness to your prayers, reality to your hopes, and sanctity to your conduct towards the living. "Always to be praised for them that are dead, as well as for them that are alive:" such is our description of God in our commemoration of the world's benefactors. And, for ourselves, no benefactors can be equal to those who have been dear and loving to us while they lived, and have guided us by their example towards that everlasting Home where they are now safe and at rest until the day of Christ's coming.

An Atheist's Epitaph.

FTER I had read and pondered our Laureate's poem in the November number of the Nineteenth Century, entitled "Despair," on which I ventured to comment briefly in the December number of this Magazine, and in which the poet vividly pourtrays the blank hopelessness and the utter loathing of life which Atheism breeds in the mind of a man possessed of any fair measure of true human sensibility, I could not help thinking of the epitaph which, I understand, has been placed on the tombstone of the late Professor Clifford in Highgate Cemetery. That epitaph seems to be intended to embody the creed of the Atheist in relation to his own origin, life, and destiny. I have not seen it, but I am informed that it runs thus:- "I was not, and was conceived; I loved, and did a little work; I am not, and grieve not."

Thus we have Atheism before us under two distinct forms, which are not only different, but which seem to be violently contradictory. If our great poet had any right, either in human nature or in human experience, to represent Atheism, however generated, as bearing its natural fruit in an unmitigated despair which is at once frantic and

sullen, and which is so intolerable that suicide becomes a necessity, the question arises as to how an Atheism so self-complacent and so comfortable as that which is reflected in Professor Clifford's epitaph is to be accounted for. Undoubtedly the latter is much more common than the former-so much more so, as to be the rule rather than the exception. Probably ninety-nine of every hundred of the professed Atheists of our time have read Tennyson's poem with no other feeling than that of an indignant contempt. They know nothing, either by experience or by observation, of the ghastly "Despair" which he has depicted, and will not believe that it exists anywhere but in his own imagination-an imagination which the poem itself, in their judgment, proves to have lost its healthiness, and to have become repulsively perverted. This is a question which it is no part of my present purpose to discuss. It is enough for me to adhere to the opinion intimated in my former paper-viz., that the despair which our poet has pourtrayed is not exaggerated, and that it must, in its main features, be the result of Atheism in all human minds and hearts which have not lost their true human sensibility, and which have not thus been more or less sadly dehumanised. If, for instance, Professor Clifford had possessed more of a true man's heart, he could never have entitled himself to such an epitaph as the one which stands over his grave. He was endowed with great intellectual powers, and, for anything I know to the contrary, he may have displayed some amiable dispositions; but, taking his epitaph as the appropriate expression of his creed, and as giving a truthful picture of his spirit, he must have been mournfully deficient in the nobler qualities of a genuine manhood.

At the same time, I acknowledge that it would be difficult for the Atheist's creed to be expressed in terser language, or in more compact form, than that which is contained in this remarkable epitaph. It tells out, in less than twenty unmistakable words, the whole substance of what the deceased professor had to say concerning himself. Whether he was the author of the epitaph, or whether it was written for him by some surviving Atheistic friend, I know not; but it may be taken as reflecting his own conviction, and may even have been written by his own hand. At any rate, it is probably unique in the cemetery into which it has been obtruded, and perhaps no other epitaph like it could be found in any of the graveyards of the world It is certainly a sign of the times, implying, as it does, the unblushing

audacity to which the spirit of Atheism has attained. It stands there, confronting the very heavens with its blank, cold-blooded, inhuman unbelief, and purporting, in its horrible pretentiousness, to be a testimony even from the very grave, to the rectitude of a Godless life. Surely this is a new thing under the sun, and as terrible as it is new.

This daring epitaph is a capital specimen of " the logic of atheism,” which is not logic at all, but an outrageous negation of logic. The mind that cannot see in Nature any marks of Design, or any proofs of a Designer-that can pronounce the Universe, with its myriad orders of existence, and its innumerable forms of life, to be without an intelligent First Cause, could alone, one would think, be capable of the solecism involved in the representation of a testimony of any kind from an extinct personality! How can such an extinct personality be supposed to say: "I was not, and was conceived; I loved, and did a little work; I am not, and grieve not"? Out of nothing, nothing can come. By nothing, nothing can be said. These are truisms which not even the audacious science of to-day can subvert. On the principles of Materialistic Atheism, human beings, when they die, pass away into the eternal silence of an eternal unconsciousness; and yet here is one of them who is represented as inscribing on his own tombstone, after death, the words, "I am not, and grieve not." On the supposition that such a representation is true to the fact—a supposition, however, which, by the nature of the case, is impossible -we have before us a miracle unparalleled in the history of the world the miracle of an articulate testimony from an annihilated man! One wonders how it was that a living Atheist did not pause before perpetrating so hideous a violation of right reason as this, and that he did not withhold it for very shame; and the only explanation of the amazing folly that I can suggest is, that his Atheism obliged him to live in an atmosphere of sophistication by which all the processes of thought are perverted, and by which its very springs are poisoned.

But I must return to the remark, that the most melancholy consideration suggested by this strange epitaph is the aspect which it gives to the mental and spiritual condition of its author. What a poor creature is man, if these words be true! He comes into existence he knows not how, and is not greatly concerned to inquire; he lives a little while, gives play to such affections as may arise

within him, and busies himself according to his tastes and predilections; and then he drops back, without a grief or the possibility of a grief, without a regret or the possibility of a regret, into the nothingness out of which he at first mysteriously sprang! Such is the modern gospel of humanity to which thousands of our young men and women are eagerly, and even gladly, listening! Such is all that our socalled leading philosophers have to announce to us concerning our past, our present, and our future! And they make the announcement with the same coolness of heart as that with which they write a mathematical axiom, or indulge in the ordinary platitudes about the weather. The ennobling ecstacies of Divine worship; the rapt and transforming adoration of the Infinite Excellence; the wistful study of the Supreme Will; the struggle upward out of a life of sin into a life of holiness'; the lowly, tranquil joy of pardon; the impulses to right living which spring from conscious obligation to the Sovereign Grace which relieves the soul from the pressure of its guilt and from the bondage of its depravity; the exalted delights of fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ; the training of the heart and hand to all unselfish and Christlike ministries; and the assured anticipation of a still securer, richer, and more blessed life beyond the grave-these sublime experiences, to which any man with a true human heart in him might well supremely aspire, are to our modern philosophical Atheist nothing better than empty, worthless fictions, worthy only of a supercilious smile of contempt. He is content to live. his little life, to get what pleasure he can out of his narrow, little loves, to occupy himself, not without a touch of self-complacency, with the little bit of work he finds to do, and then, like a dog or a donkey, to cease to be. What matters it to him that man, that he himself, is capable of rising to an immeasurably higher altitude, of moving in an immeasurably grander sphere, or of appreciating (if he could only attain it) an immeasurably nobler destiny? He is "without God and without hope in the world"-and he is easy!

It ought to do such men good to read of the insupportable sorrows which Atheism has brought to minds and hearts more manly, because less stoical, than their own. They may sneer, if they will, at Tennyson's picture of Atheistic Despair as a monstrous fiction, but there have been human histories which pretty closely answer to the picture. Let me quote a few passages from one of them :-"Many things befel me that tended to make me feel, and

feel

most painfully at times, the helplessness and cheerlessness, the gloom and wretchedness, of the man who has lost his trust in God, and his hope of a blessed immortality. There is nothing in utter doubt and unbelief to satisfy a man with a heart, even in times of health and prosperity. A man with a heart, even in his best condition, wants a Father in whose bosom he can repose; a Saviour in whose care and sympathy he can trust; and a better world to which he can look forward as his final home and resting-place, and as the eternal home and resting-place of those who are dear to him. When pain and loss came upon me, or when death or agony took hold of those who were dear to me, it was a torture to be shut out from the consolation of religion.

"On one occasion a financial panic almost destroyed the value of my property, and put an end to my income. I could once have said, 'Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall there be fruit in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stall; yet will I rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.' But now I had no God and all good ground of hope and cheerful trust had given place to fear and doubt, and sad uncertainty.

My youngest son was taken ill. He was racked with excruciating pain. And there I stood, watching bis agony, and distracted with his cries, unable to utter a whisper of a gracious Providence, or to offer up a prayer for help or deliverance. Another dear one was afflicted; and again my heart was torn, and again my lips were sealed. I could not even say to the suffering one, 'God bless you!' I was called to attend the funeral of a child. The parents were in great distress, and I was anxious to speak to them a word of comfort; but doubt and unbelief had left me no such word to speak. I was called, on another occasion, to visit a friend, a brother sceptic, who was sick and likely to die. I had often visited him when he was well, and we had managed on those occasions to interest or amuse each other; but now we were helpless. There we

were, looking on each other in the face of death, speechless and comfortless. He died, and I followed his remains to the grave. I spoke, but I had no great comforting truths with which to cheer the sad hearts of his weeping kindred. I looked down, with his disconsolate widow and his sorrowing children, into the dark, cold vault, but could say nothing of a better life.

"While I was in Nebraska my mother died. Like my father, who had died some years before, she had been a Christian from her early days; a very happy one; and she continued a Christian to the last. . . And now she was gone. I had seen her some years before when on a visit to my native land. She knew of my sceptical tendencies, and though she had faith in my desire to be right, she was afraid I should miss my way. 'Do pray, my dear son,' she said, 'do pray that God may lead you in the right path. Religion is no mistake. It is a blessed reality. . . These were the last words I heard from her lips. I listened to them in silence. Though I was too far gone to be able to sympathise with her remarks as much as I ought, I was wishful that she should enjoy all the comfort that her faith could give her. She wept; she kissed me; and I left her to see her face no more on earth. I returned to my home in America, and the