“No, I have never been.  Mr. Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?”

“He is the finest speaker of Saxon English that I have ever heard,” Mrs. Conway answered, “except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a crowd is something marvellous.  Whether you agree with him or not, you should hear him.”

I replied that I really did not know what his views were, beyond having a vague notion that he was an Atheist of a rather pronounced type, but that I would go and hear him when I had an opportunity.

Mr. Conway had passed beyond the emotional Theism of Mr. Voysey, and talk with him did something towards widening my views on the question of a Divine Existence.  I re-read carefully Mansel’s Bampton Lectures, and found in them much to provoke doubt, nothing to induce faith.  Take the following phrases, and think whither they carry us.  Dean Mansel is speaking of God as Infinite, and he says:  “That a man can be conscious of the Infinite is, then, a supposition which, in the very terms in which it is expressed, annihilates itself....  The Infinite, if it is to be conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially everything and actually nothing; for if there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing.  But again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing:  for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation.  If the infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete and capable of a higher perfection.  If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature by which it can be distinguished from anything else and discerned as an object of consciousness.”

Could any argument more thoroughly Atheistic be put before a mind which dared to think out to the logical end any train of thought?  Such reasoning can lead but to one of two ends:  despair of truth and consequent acceptance of the incomprehensible as Divine, or else the resolute refusal to profess belief where reason is helpless, and where faith is but the credulity of ignorance.  In my case, it had the latter effect.

At the same time I re-read Mill’s “Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy”, and also went through a pretty severe study of Comte’s Philosophic Positive.  I had entirely given up the use of prayer, not because I was an Atheist but because I was still a Theist.  It seemed to me to be absurd to pray, if I believed in a God who was wiser and better than myself.  An all-wise God did not need my suggestions:  an all-good God would do all that was best without my prompting.  Prayer appeared to me to be a blasphemous impertinence, and for a considerable time I had discontinued its use.  But God fades gradually out of the daily life of those who never pray; a God who is not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space whence resounds no echo of man’s cry.