The two extremes of Carlile’s career exhibit a coincidence of terms, but betray to the initiated observer a radical progress and distinction of opinion. In his first work, he wrote, ‘Science is the Antichrist;’(2) in his last, ‘Science is the Christ.’(3) When he wrote the first he was a Deist, when he wrote the last he was an Atheist. We commonly find that extreme political enthusiasts in youth, pass, in old age, like Sir Francis Burdett, into extreme Conservatism: but it is a phenomenon in intellect, that Carlile, whose convictions, not his passions, led him to hold positive materialism, should lapse into a more than Swedenborgian mysticism. ‘I have discovered,’ said he, ‘that the names of the Old Testament, either apparently of persons or places, are not such names as the religious mistakes have constructed, but names of states of mind manifested in the human race, and, in this sense, the Bible may be scientifically read as a treatise on spirit, soul, or mind, and not as a history of time, people, and place.’(4) To insist on the utility of such a theory, except as a mere theory of theological explanation (useful as explaining it away altogether), was very strange in Carlile. It seems like the artifice of a beaten man to conciliate an implacable enemy. But Carlile was no beaten man. A few months only before his death, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel, in reference to the imprisonment of Mr. Southwell and myself, avowing his determination to renew martyrdom, if Sir Robert persisted in reviving persecution. But Carlile did make the capital error of proposing to explain science under Christian terms, which was giving to science, which is universal, a sectarian character. Hence, he was found using the words God, soul, Christ, etc., with all the pertinacity of a divine, and scandalising his friends by taking out his diploma as a preacher. In this, he manifested his old courage. He was still true to himself, and was still an Atheist, but veiling his materialism under a Swedenborgian nomenclature. 1. Repub. vol. xiv. p, 770. 2. Preface, p. 14. to vol. i. of Repub. 3. Christian Warrior. 4. Christian Warrior, p. 30.