, I must receive it simply as matter of prophecy. If the
necessity has continued so long, then, for aught I know, it may
continue for ever; the evil is all too certain,--the bright futurity
is still a futurity. But if it ever became a reality, it would not
neutralize one of the dark imputations which such a theory of the
original destination and creation of man casts on the Divine
character; not to say, that, if Mr. Newman's doubts of man's
immortality be well founded, that better future will be of no
more avail to the myriads of our race who have suffered under the
long iron regime of necessity, than a reprieve to the wretch who
was executed yesterday!

I told Harrington I must have a copy of the paper he had just read.
I should like, with his leave, to publish it.

"O, and welcome," said he. "Only remember that its tendency is to show
that there is no tenable resting place between a revealed religion
and none at all; between the Bible and scepticism. If you make men
sceptics,--mind, it is not my fault."

"I will take the risk," said I. "I wish the controversy to be brought
to the issue you have mentioned. I know there will never be many
sceptics, any more than there will be many atheists; and if men are
convinced that the Via Media is as hard to find as you suppose,--or
as that between Romanism and Protestantism,--they will take refuge in
the BIBLE. And if it be the BOOK OF GOD indeed, this is the issue
to which the great controversy will and ought to come. But how is it
you were not tempted to become an atheist rather than a sceptic?"

"Why," said he, with a smile, "the great master of the Modern
Academy had fortified me against that. Hume, you know, confesses
that, if men be discovered without any impression of a Deity,--genuine
atheists,--we may assume that they will be found the most degraded
of the species, and only one remove above the brutes. Now I have no
wish to be set down in that category."

"Very different." said I, "is the account our modern atheists give
of themselves: they are contending that the banishment of God from
the universe, by one or other of the various theories of Atheism or
Pantheism (which I take to be the same thing, with different names),
is the tendency of all modern science? and that when that science
is perfect, God will be no more."

"My dear uncle," replied Harrington, "you are insufficiently informed
in the mystery of modern theology. There are no atheists, properly
speaking