If we have said enough for this purpose, we may attempt to trace the limits of our subject. The road through every high question lies over precipices. Every great question has its Mont Blancs. The higher you climb the deeper the chasms on the right hand and on the left. The Roman Catholic makes worship an art, and abject submission a duty. To relieve you of anxiety he deprives the mind of initiation and freedom. The Protestant concedes you private judgment, and surrounds you by a social despotism lest you should use it. He substitutes a creed for the Church. The Church is a cell, and the creed is a cage. The cage is lighter, more airy, and less repulsive than the cell, but the imprisonment is complete in both. Mere Atheism inculcates freedom and intrepidity of the understanding, but may land you in negation, in dogmatism, in denunciation, in irreverence. These are the chasms that lie in the path of mere Atheism. The traveller who passes into these is lost. To avoid this danger we must keep within the limits naturally prescribed to Affirmative Atheism, which are:-- 1. Positivism in Principle. 2. Exactness in Profession of Opinion. 3. Dispassionateness in Judgment. 4. Humanism in Conception. 1. The Positivist conception of Atheism exhibits the limits which modern thought has impressed upon it. Affirmative Atheism asserts the realism of Nature; Theism denies it. Theism refuses to recognise the self-existence, the self-action, the self-subsistence, eternity, and infinity of the universe. Theism is the negation of Nature. It is a species of impiety towards nature, and supplants, by an artificial superstition, the instinctive reverence of the human heart. Modern Atheism is falsely regarded as a mere negation, as a species of criminal vacuity of the understanding. To correct this idea is to win for these opinions attention if not assent. The negation of any error is useful, but it should be followed by its complement of positive truth. All mere negative subjects are like the lime and pebbles swallowed by farm fowl to assist digestion, but it fares ill with the fowl if they get nothing but stones to digest; if no corn or barley follows to be operated upon. Now, questions of Atheism and Scepticism are the digestive stimuli of the mind; positive principles supply the corn and barley which sustain the mental system and preserve its life. If we give ourselves up to negative subjects merely, we come to resemble the theologians who, as Talleyrand said, 'pick a great many bones for very little meat.'