Dr. Balguy in the course of a Treatise which the ‘liberal’ author of a Sketch of the Denominations of the Christian World, ’considered an excellent antidote against atheistical tenets,’ expresses himself in the following manner:  ’Of all the false opinions which ever infested the mind of man, nothing can possibly equal that of atheism, which is such a monstrous contradiction of all evidence, to all the powers of the understanding and the dictates of common sense, that it may well be questioned whether any man can really fall into it by a deliberate use of his judgment.  All nature so clearly points out, and so clearly proclaims a Creator of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, that whoever hears not its voice and sees not its proofs may well be thought wilfully deaf and obstinately blind.’

These are notable specimens of zeal turned sour.

Now, when it is considered that such writings are carefully put into popular hands, and writings of an irreligious character as carefully kept out of them, astonishment at human intolerance must cease.  So far, indeed, from wondering that the ‘giddy multitude’ shrink aghast from Atheists we shall conceive it little short of miraculous, that they do not fall upon and tear them to pieces.

Beattie, another Christian doctor, towards the close of his celebrated Essay on the Immutability of Truth, denounces every sincere outspoken unbeliever as a ‘murderer of human souls,’ and it being obvious that the murderer of a single soul must to the ‘enlightened’ majority of our people appear an act infinitely more horrible than the butchery of many bodies, it really does at first view seem ‘passing strange’ that body murderers are almost invariably hanged, whilst they who murder ‘souls,’ if punished at all, usually escape with some harmless abuse and a year or two’s imprisonment.

Even the ‘tolerant’ Richard Watson, Lord Bishop of Llandaff, wrote with contemptuous bitterness of ‘Atheistical madmen,’ and in his Apology for the Bible, assured Deistical Thomas Paine, Deism was so much better than Atheism, he (Bishop Watson) meant ’not to say anything to its discredit.’

The Rev. Mr. Ward, whose ‘Ideal of a Christian Church’ spread such consternation in the anti-popish camp, describes his own hatred of Protestantism as ‘fierce and burning.’  Nothing can go beyond that—­it is the ne plus ultra of bigotry, and just such hatred is displayed towards Atheists by at least nine-tenths of their opponents.  Strange to say, in Christians, in the followers of him who is thought to have recommended, by act and word, unlimited charity, who is thought to have commanded that we judge not, that we be sat judged; the Atheist finds his most active foe, his bitterest and least scrupulous maligner.  To exaggerate their bigotry would be difficult, for whether sage or simple, learned or unlearned, priests or priest-led, they regularly practise the denunciation of Atheists in language foul as it is false.  They call them ‘traitors to human kind,’ yea ‘murderers of the human soul,’ and unless hypocrites, or much better than their sentiments, would rather see them swing upon the gibbet than murderers of the body, especially if like John Tawell, ‘promoters of religion and Christian Missions.’