The change of public opinion, illustrated by the conversion of the _Quarterly_, gave greater bitterness to the attacks of the enemies that remained unconverted. But it gave them no new arguments. In Godwin’s _Enquiry concerning Population_ (when we neglect mere epigrams such as “a man is surer that he has ancestors than that he will have posterity”) there are substantially four arguments:—Malthus has changed his position; the world is not peopled; the ratios are not as he represents; and experience is against him. We have already discussed the first. The use of the second implies a misunderstanding of the Malthusian position, for it ignores distinction between actual and possible supplies of food, and does not allow that a man is “confined” by four walls unless he touches them.[835] Godwin does not mend the argument by comparing it to the objection brought against Christianity—“the world is not yet Christianized”; still less by appealing to Christianity itself, and taunting Malthus with the texts, “Increase and multiply,” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” “made a little lower than the angels,” “forty sons and thirty grandsons, which rode on threescore and ten ass colts,” “In the last days some shall depart from the faith, forbidding to marry.”[836] Malthus had been attacked in 1807 by a Puritan or Covenanting pamphlet entitled, ‘A summons of Wakening, or the evil tendency and danger of Speculative Philosophy, exemplified in Mr. [Sir John] Leslie’s _Enquiry into the Nature of Heat_, and Mr. Malthus’ _Essay on Population_, and in that speculative system of common law which is at present administered in these kingdoms.’[837] The body of this book had been even more remarkable than its title, for it had proved Malthus guilty not merely of heterodoxy, but of atheism. “It is evident to any one who attentively reads the _Essay on Population_ that its author does not believe in the existence of God, but substitutes for Him sometimes the principle of Population, sometimes that of Necessity.” Sadler many years later declared in the same spirit that “the insults the theory of Malthus levels at God, and the injuries it meditates inflicting upon man, will be endured by neither.”[838]