Whilst he thus arranged a match between Hogg and his sister, Shelley knew that his friend was a Freethinker on questions relating to religion. From what had recently taken place in respect to his sceptical correspondence with Miss Harriett Grove, he knew that his father and mother concurred with his uncle and aunt Grove in regarding religious scepticism with repugnance and horror; knew that his father and mother would regard their eldest daughter's marriage to a Freethinker as a terrible and supreme calamity. Yet he was coolly and secretly scheming for such a marriage of their sixteen-years-old daughter, and was cautiously 'illuminating' her out of the Christian religion, and otherwise training her to become the fit wife of a man, whom he had good reason to know her parents would never consent to accept for their son-in-law. The young gentleman does all this in absolute indifference to the rights and feelings of his own father and mother--with absolute carelessness for the serious trouble he is preparing for his father, the agonizing sorrow he is preparing for his mother. Am I wrong in saying that the young man (_ætat._ 18), who acted in this manner to his father and mother and his younger sister, was guilty of domestic treason? What was the literary enterprise on which Shelley was at work during the earlier weeks of this Christmas recess (1810-11)?--the work that was offered to Mr. Stockdale during the recess?--the work about whose publication Mr. Hogg, whilst staying at a London hotel, had several interviews with the Pall-Mall publisher, who, sixteen years later, professed to have been most unfavourably impressed by the Oxonian's appearance, speech, and manner, at those interviews? The general opinion of the 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' is that the work thus submitted to the bookseller was _The Necessity of Atheism_, the pamphlet that resulted in Shelley's expulsion from his college? Mr. Garnett has no doubt that the work was 'either the unlucky pamphlet which occasioned Shelley's expulsion from Oxford, or something of a very similar description.' Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy goes a step further, and speaks of it roundly as the manuscript of _The Necessity of Atheism_. That the manuscript, which afforded Stockdale another opportunity for warning Mr. Timothy Shelley to remove his son from Mr. Hogg's pernicious influences, was a sceptical performance is unquestionable. But there are grounds for a strong opinion that it was neither _The Necessity of Atheism_, nor any tract written on the same lines as that notorious pamphlet. The evidence is conclusive that up to the time, and beyond the time, when Stockdale was invited to publish the pamphlet, Shelley believed in the existence of a supreme Deity. He had for a considerable period ceased to be a Christian. But he still believed in God. To hold, therefore, that the manuscript declined by Stockdale was _The Necessity of Atheism_, or 'something of a _very similar