No one can conceive a supernatural Being, and what none can conceive, none ought to worship, or even assert the existence of.  Who worships a something of which he knows nothing, is an idolater.  To talk of, or bow down to it, is nonsensical; to pretend affection for it, is worse than nonsensical.  Such conduct, however pious, involves the rankest hypocrisy; the meanest and most odious species of idolatry; for labouring to destroy which, Atheists are called ’murderers of the human soul,’ ‘blasphemers,’ and other foolish names, too numerous to mention.

It would be well for all parties, if those who raise against Atheists the cry of ‘blasphemy,’ were made to perceive that godless unbelievers cannot be blasphemers; for, as contended by Lord Brougham in his Life of Voltaire, blasphemy implies belief, and, therefore, Atheists who do not believe in God, cannot logically or justly be said to blaspheme him.  The blasphemer, properly so called, is he who imagines Deity, and ascribes to the idol of his own brain, all manner of folly, contradiction, inconsistency, and wickedness.  Yes, the blasphemer is he who invents a monster and calls it God; while to reject belief therein, is an act both reasonable and virtuous.

Superstition is universally abhorred, but no one believes himself superstitious.  There never was a religionist who believed his own religion mere superstition.  All shrink indignantly from the charge of being superstitious; while all raise temples to, and bow down before, ‘thingless names.’  The ‘masses’ of every nation erect ‘thingless names’ into substantial realities, and woe to those, who follow not the insane example.  The consequences—­the fatal consequences—­are everywhere apparent.  In our own country, one consequence is social disunion on the grandest possible scale.  Society is split up into an almost infinite variety of sects, whose members imagine themselves patented to think truth, and never to be wrong in the enunciation of it.  This if no idle or frivolous charge, as the Author of this Apology can easily show.

Before him is Sanders’ News Letter and Daily Advertiser of Feb. 18, 1845, which, among other curiosities, contains an ’Address of the Dublin Protestant Operative Association, and Reformation Society,’ one sentence of which is—­’We have raised our voices against the spirit of compromise, which is the opprobrium of the age; we have unfurled the banner of Protestant truth, and placed ourselves beneath it, we have insisted upon Protestant ascendancy as just and equitable, because Protestant principles are true and undeniable.’

Puseyite Protestants tell a tale the very reverse of that so modestly told by their nominal brethren of the Dublin Operative Association.  They, as may be seen in Palmer’s Letter to Golightly, ’utterly reject and anathematise the principle of Protestantism, as a heresy with all its forms, sects, or denominations.’  Nor is that all our ’Romeward Divines’ do, for in addition