Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2): With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh EditionRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2): With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh Edition
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Bradlaugh, Charles, 1833-1891
It follows, however, that all early Atheism, so-called, was only the
rejection of theistic ideas from some part of the business of life.
The Christians were "Atheists" for the Pagan multitude, because they
rejected the only God-ideas which the Pagan multitude harboured. In the
same way the Christians who later scouted the worship of images of God
(as Persians and Jews had done long before) were Atheists for those
Christians who could only conceive of an imaged God. Prejudice has its
own logic. When again medical men rested more and more on inductive
method and rational (even if mistaken) procedure, and less and less on
sorcery and invocation, they were naturally called Atheists, because
they excluded "God" from an important and perilous province of action.
Logically, the more a man is a Theist, the more of "God's" intervention
he sees in life. No man is a Theist in all things; but in the ages of
ignorance men were theistic in most matters. The kingdom of God, in
a practical sense, is a sphere in which man is confessedly ignorant
or impotent. "God's will" is the name for the forces which man cannot
control, and does not understand. It covers a storm, a pestilence, a
good or bad harvest, a stroke of luck, but not an indigestion, or the
breaking of coal when struck by a hammer. Thus it is that every new
advance of science, every new explanation of a body of facts in terms
of law and innate tendency, is at first denounced as Atheistic. After
the physicians came the physicists. The great Kepler, in keeping with
his idealistic method, was so steeped in Theism as to fancy that the
planets were kept up to time by guiding angels. Newton, however, was
flatly accused of Atheism for explaining the universe in terms of
the law of gravitation. He had driven God out of the world, it was
said; and so far as his physics went, it was true. Yet he himself
was an ardent Theist; and he even sought to make good his Theism by
the theory that "matter" was first without gravitation, and that God
added the attribute. With or without this safeguard, however, Newton's
generalisation was sufficiently abstract to leave popular religion
intact; and practical Theism even assimilated and gained by his
science. It was not till geologists began to explain the formation of
the earth in terms of law and tendency that the great shock came. God
had hitherto been generally conceived as shaping the earth, were it
only because there was no other explanation at hand; and, above all,
geology clashed with Genesis. Hence a much more serious resistance,
and a much more general imputation of Atheism; though the first
geologists were mostly Deists, and believers in the special creation
of animal life. The next and the most serious shock was that given by
Darwinism, which removed "the divine idea" from biology. Over this came
the loudest outcry of all; and the odium would have been overwhelming
were it not for the number of naturalists who took up the new doctrine
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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