In regard to Mr. Atkinson and his philosophy, accepted by her with such satisfaction, and which henceforth became the master-light of all her seeing, our allotted space will allow us only to speak very briefly. The results of this new mental departure could not but disturb and afflict many of her friends, to whom faith in God, Christ, and immortality was still dear. To Miss Martineau herself, however, her disbelief in these seemed a happy emancipation. She carried into the assertion of her new and unpopular ideas the same honesty and courage she had always shown, and also the same superb dogmatism and contempt for those who differed from her. Apparently it was always to her an absolute impossibility to imagine herself wrong when she had once come to a conclusion. In theory she might conceive it possible to be mistaken, but practically she felt herself infallible. The following examples will show how she speaks, throughout her biography, of those who held the opinions she had rejected. Miss Martineau, being a Necessarian, says, "All the best minds I know are Necessarians; all, indeed, who are qualified to discuss the subject at all." "The very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational being to see that the constitution and action of will are determined by the influences beyond the control of the possessor of the faculty." She adds, that for more than thirty years she has seen how awful "are the evils which arise from that monstrous remnant of old superstition,--the supposition of a self-determining power, etc." Now, among those she had intimately known were Dr. Channing and James Martineau, neither of them believing in the doctrine of Necessity. Speaking of Christianity, after she had rejected it, she calls it "a monstrous superstition." Elsewhere she speaks of "the Christian superstition of the contemptible nature of the body;" says that "Christians deprave their moral sense;" talks of "the selfish complacencies of religion," and of "the atmosphere of selfishness which is the very life of Christian doctrine and of every other theological scheme;" speaks of "the Christian mythology as a superstition which fails to make happy, fails to make good, fails to make wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies it took the place of." "For three centuries it has been undermined, and its overthrow completely decided." Thus easily does she settle the question of Christianity.