t not design; that he can neither
love truth, justice, nor his neighbour, except by sheer luck, and that,
if bad as his principles, would cut the throat of every man, woman, and
child who might have the misfortune to fall in his way. They argue as if
none can think good thoughts or purposely perform good acts unless so
far eaten up by superstition as always to keep in view the probable
_rewards_, or equally probable _vengeance_ of some supernatural Being.
Faith in human goodness, irrespective of reward and punishment, either
here or hereafter, sophists of this bigotted class have literally none.
Influenced by fanaticism and stimulated by cupidity they let slip no
opportunity of dealing out upon such as oppose their hideous doctrines
the choicest sort of vituperative blackguardism. The reader knows this
is no idle or ill-considered charge. He has seen at the commencement of
this Apology verbatim extracts, affecting the moral character of
Atheists, from books written by pious Christians, so utterly disgusting
that only those in whom every sense of delicacy, truth, and justice has
been obliterated, by a worse than savage creed, can peruse them without
horror.

Not inaptly, we conceive, has religion been likened to a madman's robe,
for the least puff of reason parts it and shows the wearer's nakedness.
This view of religion explains the otherwise inexplicable fact that
eminent piety is usually associated with eminent imbecility. Such men as
Newton, Locke, and Bacon are not remembered and reverenced on account of
their faith. By all but peddling narrow-thoughted bigots they are held
in honour for their science, their matter-of-fact philosophy; not their
puerile conceits about 'airy nothings,' to which half crazed
supernaturalists have assigned 'a local habitation and a name.' Lord
Bacon laid down principles so remote from pious, that no man can
understand and philosophise in strict accordance with them, if he fears
to embrace Atheism. From his _Novum Organum Scientiarum_ may be
extracted an antidote to the poison of superstition, for it is there we
are told that _aiming at divine things through the human, breeds only an
odd mixture of imaginations_. There we are told that _Man, the servant
and interpreter of Nature, can only understand and act in proportion as
he observes or contemplates the order of nature--more he cannot do._
There too is set down the wise lesson that truth is justly to be called
the daughter, not of Autho