nexorable." A survey of Church
History brings out what Godwin calls "the mixed character of
Christianity, its horrors and its graces." In much of what has come down
to us from the Old Testament he sees the inevitable effects of
anthropomorphism, when the religion of a barbarous age is reduced to
writing, and handed down as the effect of inspiration. He cannot
sufficiently admire the beauty of Christ's teaching of a perfect
disinterestedness and self-denial--a doctrine in his own terminology of
"universal benevolence." But the disciples lived in a preternatural
atmosphere, continually busied with the four Last Things, death,
judgment, heaven, and hell; and they distorted the beauty of the
Christian morality by introducing an other-worldliness, to which the
ancients had been strangers. From this came the despotism of the Church
based on the everlasting burnings and the keys, and something of the
spirit of St. Dominic and the Inquisition can be traced, he thinks, even
to the earliest period of Christianity. The Gospel sermons do not always
realise the Godwinian ideal of rational persuasion.

Godwin's own view is in the main what we should call agnostic: "I do not
consider my faculties adequate to pronouncing upon the cause of all
things. I am contented to take the phenomena as I behold them, without
pretending to erect an hypothesis under the idea of making all things
easy. I do not rest my globe of earth upon an elephant [a reference to
the Indian myth], and the elephant upon a tortoise. I am content to take
my globe of earth simply, in other words to observe the objects which
present themselves to my senses, without undertaking to find out a cause
why they are what they are."

With cautious steps, he will, however, go a little further than this.
He regards with reverence and awe "that principle, whatever it is, which
acts everywhere around me." But he will not slide into anthropomorphism,
nor give to this Supreme Thing, which recalls Shelley's Demogorgon, the
shape of a man. "The principle is not intellect; its ways are not our
ways." If there is no particular Providence, there is none the less a
tendency in nature which seconds our strivings, guarantees the work of
reason, and "in the vast sum of instances, works for good, and operates
beneficially for us." The position reminds us of Matthew Arnold's
definition of God as "the stream of tendency by which all things strive
to fulfil the law of their being." "We have here