human creature, in order to
begin a torture of him which will last for all eternity. Man's true
savior, Lucretius argues, is science, which makes this belief ridiculous
by showing clearly that all individual things--human beings
included--are nothing but atomic aggregations, which, having been formed
for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any
avenging God be anything more than the distempered dream of children?
How could such a God torture men when they die, since as soon as they
are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of
irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be
tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly
need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be
pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own
rendering of the great Lucretian message, I may here give a few stanzas
as specimens:

Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze
Go off. Those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their sands of whiteness other bays.

How, then, the poet asks, shall the individual man be more enduring than
these?

What, shall the dateless worlds in dust be blown
Back to the unremembered and unknown,
And this frail Thou--this flame of yesterday--
Burn on forlorn, immortal and alone?

What though there lurks behind yon veil of sky
Some fabled Maker, some immortal Spy,
Ready to torture each poor thing he made?
Thou canst do more than God can. Thou canst die.

Will not the thunders of thy God be dumb
When thou art deaf for ever? Can the sum
Of all things bruise what is not? Nay, take heart,
For where thou go'st thither no God can come.

And no omnipotent wearer of a crown
Of righteousness, or fiend with branded frown
Swart from the pit, shall break or reach thy rest,
Or stir thy temples from the eternal down.

In writing this poem I experienced the full sensation of having become a
convert to the Lucretian gospel myself, against which throughout my life
it had been my dominant impulse to protest.

There are, doubtless, many others who experience this disconcerting
vicissitude--for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are
ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end
ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is t