lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary in social life.  Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the food, the associates, all are bad.  They are trained into vice, educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall arise crime.  And the root of all is poverty and ignorance.  Educate the children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear.  Man is God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism.  Man is the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on, he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what is to come.  Make the circumstances good and the results will be good, for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.  Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism, destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our toil."[23]

This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism of our day.  And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation.  It is a virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion.  It will have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it is ever spurred on by the feeling, “The night cometh, when no man can work.”  Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles the more strenuously to work out man’s salvation by his own strength.  “To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe’s assurance that ‘earth’s wrongs and agonies’ ‘will be righted hereafter.’  Granting for a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that ’the next world’ will be any improvement on this?  Miss Cobbe assures us that this is ‘God’s world’; whose world will the next be, if not also His?  Will