From one of his early letters we find that he contemplated a translation of the _System of Nature_, which is frequently quoted in the notes to _Queen Mob_. He couples Jehovah and Mammon together as fit for the worship of "those who delight in wickedness and slavery." In a letter to Henry Reveley he pictures God as delighted with his creation of the earth, and seeing it spin round the sun; and imagines him taking out "patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture." When the poet was informed by Oilier that a certain gentleman (it was Archdeacon Hare) hoped he would humble his soul and "receive the spirit into him," Shelley replied: "if you know him personally, pray ask him from me what he means by receiving the _spirit into me_; and (if really it is any good) how one is to get at it." He goes on to say: "I was immeasurably amused by the quotation from Schlegel about the way in which the popular faith is destroyed--first the Devil, then the Holy Ghost, then God the Father. I had written a Lucianic essay to prove the same thing." In the very year of his death, writing to John Gisborne, he girds at the popular faith in God, and with reference to one of its most abhorrent doctrines he exclaims--"As if, after sixty years' suffering here, we were to be roasted alive for sixty million more in hell, or charitably annihilated by a _coup de grâce_ of the bungler who brought us into existence at first."--A dozen other quotations from Shelley's letters might be given, all to pretty much the same effect, but the foregoing must suffice. A thorough analysis of Shelley's poetry, showing the essential Atheism which runs through it from beginning to end, would require more space than we have at our command. We shall therefore simply point out, by means of instances, how indignantly or contemptuously he always refers to religion as the great despot and impostor of mankind. The _Revolt of Islam_ stigmatises "Faith" as "an obscene worm." The sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte concludes with a reference to "Bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time." Shelley frequently conceives Faith as serpentine and disgusting. In _Rosalind and Helen_ he writes-- Grey Power was seated Safely on her ancestral throne; And Faith, the Python, undefeated, Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on Her foul and wounded train. In the great and splendid _Ode to Liberty_ the image undergoes a Miltonic sublimation. Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves Hung tyranny; beneath, sat deified The sister-pest, congregator of slaves. Invariably does the poet class religion and oppression together--"Religion veils her eyes: Oppression shrinks aghast."--"Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred brood."--"And laughter fills the Fane, and curses shake the Throne."