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; they who are so called merely deny any personal, conscious, intelligent sovereign of the universe.  Even those who call themselves so, and will have it that they are so, are told that they are none.  I myself have perused statements of some of our modern ‘spiritualists,’ who know every thing, even other people’s consciousness quite as well as their own (and perhaps better), that the said atheists are mistaken in thinking themselves such; that such genuine love of the spirit of universal nature is something truly divine, and that they are animated by ‘a deeply religious spirit,’ though they never suspected it!”

“Well,” said I. “if you had too much reason, as you flattered yourself (adopting Hume’s criterion), to become an atheist, could you not have adopted such views as those of Mr. G. Atkinson and Miss Martineau, who both possess surely (as they claim to possess) that ‘religious reverence’ of nature of which you have just spoken?”