The reproachful canting cry of heretic, infidel, atheist, etc., will be raised against the author of these lectures, by every fiery intolerant bigot into whose hands they may fall. But he alone is the true infidel who forsakes the laws of his Nature, and gives up his mind to a belief in fabulous and demoralising legends, which contradict all experience, and stand in opposition to the testimony of his own senses and reason.** In regard to the term Atheist, which, of all others, is meant to be the most opprobrious, let our angry zealot, in the first place, define precisely what he means by the word:--if he explains it by saying "it signifies one who supposes that there is no God;" we reply that it is impossible to understand this definition until he declares in express and intelligible terms what he means by the word "God." If it is used to designate that incomprehensible POWER by which the universe is ruled, there cannot be such a thing as an Atheist in existence. * It was formerly maintained by hangmen and funeral piles, and now by clerical riches and power, hereditary lawgivers, harsh judges, ignorant juries, fines and imprisonments. ** Diderot, in illustrating the conflict of priests against reason, says, "Bewildered in an immense forest during the night, and having only one small torch for my guide, a stranger approaches, and thus addresses me,--'Friend, blow out thy light if thou wouldst make sure of the right path.'"--This stranger was a priest. Do the Jews, Christians, and Mahommedans, by their wild and degrading anthropomorphism, or by forming their deity in the likeness of any entity that the human mind can conceive, evince a worthy, or anything approaching to an adequate, conception of the unknown,* all-ruling _Power_? Quite the contrary; for in absurdly imbodying it as a located Being, or by conferring personification in any shape or manner whatsoever, they impiously create one of those idols which they pretend to abhor, and become themselves idolators. These alone are the real Atheists, as they not only endow their man-God with the worst of human frailties and passions, but contemn and repudiate the true revelation of Nature. The mean and grovelling notions which the half-inch mind of the priest-led fanatic has of his God (for instance the Jewish one), form a striking contrast with the elevated and pure ideas which fill the mind of Nature's free votary, towards the one universal Power,--a veneration infinitely too exalted to allow for a moment the puerile and ridiculous notion of its being personified in the form or likeness of any existing thing.** * What do theologues now know of that which they call Deity more than was known to the philosophic Brahmin, Egyptian, or Zoroastrian, ten thousand years ago? Absolutely nothing. What does the pampered Oxonian professor of theology know more of it than the meanest cow-boy in England? Absolutely nothing.