The Heavenly Father: Lectures on Modern AtheismNaville, Ernest
Religion
The Heavenly Father: Lectures on Modern Atheism
Naville, Ernest
Atheism; God -- Proof
When the mind is engaged in these pernicious ways, the spring of the
moral life is broken, and the practical consequence is not long in
appearing. The philosophers of success, having become the philosophers
of the _fait accompli_, accept all and endure all; but in another sense
than that in which charity accepts all, that it may transform all by the
power of love. It is the morality of Philinte:
I take men quietly, and as they are:
And what they do I train my soul to bear.[151]
These instructions are not very necessary. There will always be people
enough found ready to applaud victory, and to fall in with the _fait
accompli_. But is it not sad to see men of mind, men of heart too,
perhaps, making themselves the theorists of baseness, and the
philosophers of cowardice?
There is still more to be said. From the glorification of success the
mind passes necessarily, as we have just seen, to the glorification
alike of all that is. It would appear at first sight that the adept in
the doctrine must find himself in a condition of indifference with
regard to what prejudiced men continue to call good and evil. This
indifference however is only apparent. When it is granted that nothing
is evil, the part of good disappears in the end. There had been formed
in ancient Rome, under pretence of religion, a secret society, which had
as its fundamental dogma the aphorism that _nothing is evil_.[152] The
members of the society did not practise good and evil, it appears, with
equal indifference, for the magistrates of the republic took alarm, and
smothered, by a free employment of death and imprisonment, a focus of
murders, violations, false witness, and forged signatures. This fact
reveals, with ominous clearness, a movement of thought on the nature of
which it is easy to speculate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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