h morality must
perish, owing to its contradictions and its inconsistencies, must be
perilous for all but those happily constituted minds for whom simple
faith and submission are a part of their essence, who believe on hearsay
and seek not to understand, but merely glance at the surface of the
difficult and venturesome questions which are discussed before them,
either because they feel their weakness, or because the light of
revelation shines upon them so strongly as to make that of reason pale.
For more logical minds, however, for such who are inquisitive, whose
reason is both anxious and exacting, who want to understand before they
believe, for whom the ties which linked them to tradition have been
loosened, owing to their having reflected on a number of contradictions
(the least of which, in the case of Lord Byron, was decidedly not that
of seeing such a philosophy professed and adopted in a clerical
university); for minds like these such doctrines must necessarily lead
to atheism. Though Lord Byron's mind was one of these, he escaped the
fearful results by a still greater effort of his reason, which made him
reject the precepts of the sensualists, and comprehend their
inconsistencies.

His protest against the doctrines of the sensualists is entered in his
memorandum, where, after naming all the authors of the philosophical
systems which he had read, and, coming to the head of that school, he
exclaims from the bottom of his heart:

"Hobbes! I detest him!"

And notwithstanding the respect with which the good and great Locke must
individually have inspired him, he evidently must have repudiated his
precepts, inasmuch as they were not strong enough to uproot from his
mind the religious truths which reason proclaims, nor prevent either his
coming out of his philosophical struggle a firm believer in all the
dogmas which are imperiously upheld to the human reason, or his
proclaiming his belief in one God and Creator, in our free will, and in
the immortality of the soul.

This glorious and noble victory of his mind and true religious
tendencies at that time, is evinced in his "Prayer to Nature," written
when he had not yet reached his eighteenth year. In this beautiful
prayer, which his so-called orthodox friends succeeded in having cut out
of the volume containing his earliest poems, we find both great power of
contemplation and humility and confidence in prayer--a soul too near the
Creator to doubt of His Omnipo