ATHEIST

" . . . without God [literally, atheists] in the world."--_Paul_.

"Yonder is a man with his back toward Zion, and he is coming to meet us.

So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up to them. His name was

Atheist, and he asked them whither they were going? We are going to the

Mount Zion, they answered. Then Atheist fell into a very great laughter.

What is the meaning of your laughter? they asked. I laugh to see what

ignorant persons you are to take upon you so tedious a journey, and yet

are like to have nothing but your travel for your pains. Why, man? Do

you think we shall not be received? they said. Received! There is no

such place as you dream of in all this world. But there is in the world

to come, replied Christian. When I was at home, Atheist went on, in mine

own country I heard as you now affirm, and, from that hearing, I went out

to see, and have been seeking this city you speak of this twenty years,

but find no more of it than I did the first day I set out. And, still

laughing, he went his way."

Having begun to tell us about Atheist, why did Bunyan not tell us more?

We would have thanked him warmly to-night for a little more about this

unhappy man. Why did the dreamer not take another eight or ten pages in

order to tell us, as only he could have told us, how this man that is now

Atheist had spent his past twenty years seeking Mount Zion? Those

precious unwritten pages are now buried in John Strudwick's vault in

Bunhill Fields, and no other man has arisen able to handle Bunyan's

biographic pen. Had Bunyan but put off the entrance of Christian and

Hopeful into the city till he had told us something more about the twenty

years it had taken this once earnest pilgrim to become an atheist, how

valuable an interpolation that would have been! What was it that made

this man to set out so long ago for the Celestial City? What was it that

so stoutly determined him to leave off all his old companions and turn

his back on the sweet refreshments of his youth? How did he do at the

Slough of Despond? Did he come that way? What about the Wicket Gate,

and the House Beautiful, and the Interpreter's House, and the Delectable

Mountains? What men, and especially what women, did he meet and converse

with on his way? What were his fortunes, and what his misfortunes? How

much did he lay out at Vanity Fair, and on what? At what point of his

twenty years' way did his youthful faith begin to shake, and his youthful

love begin to become lukewarm? And what was it that at last made him

quite turn round his back on Zion and his face to his own country? I

cannot forgive Bunyan to-night for not telling us the story of Atheist's

conversion, his pilgrimage, and his apostasy in full.

At the same time, though it cannot be denied that Bunyan has lost at this

point a great opportunity for his genius and for our advantage,--at the

same time, he undoubtedly did a very courageous thing in introducing

Atheist at all; and, especially, in introducing him to us and making him

laugh so loudly at us when we are on the very borders of the land of

Beulah. A less courageous writer, and a writer less sure of his ground,

would have left out Atheist altogether; or, if he had felt constrained to

introduce him, would have introduced him at any other period of our

history rather than at this period. Under other hands than Bunyan's we

would have met with this mocking reprobate just outside the City of

Destruction; or, perhaps, among the booths of Vanity Fair; or, indeed,

anywhere but where we now meet him. And, that our greater-minded author

does not let loose the laughter of Atheist upon us till we are almost out

of the body is a stroke of skill and truth and boldness that makes us

glad indeed that we possess such a sketch at Bunyan's hand at all, all

too abrupt and all too short as that sketch is. In the absence, then, of

a full-length and finished portrait of Atheist, we must be content to

fall back on some of the reflections and lessons that the mere mention of

his name, the spot he passes us on, and the ridicule of his laughter, all

taken together, awaken in our minds. One rapid stroke of such a brush as

that of John Bunyan conveys more to us than a full-length likeness, with

all the strongest colours, of any other artist would be able to do.

1. One thing the life-long admiration of John Bunyan's books has helped

to kindle and burn into my mind and my imagination is this: What a

universe of things is the heart of man! Were there nothing else in the

heart of man but all the places and all the persons and all the

adventures that John Bunyan saw in his sleep, what a world that would

open up in all our bosoms! All the pilgrims, good and bad--they, or the

seed and possibility of them all, are all in your heart and in mine. All

the cities, all the roads that lead from one city to another, with all

the paths and all the by-paths,--all the adventures, experiences,

endurances, conflicts, overthrows, victories,--all are within us and

never are to be seen anywhere else. Heaven and hell, God and the devil,

life and death, salvation and damnation, time and eternity, all are

within us. "There is no Mount Zion in all this world," bellowed out this

blinded fool. "No; I know that quite well," quickly responded Christian;

"but there is in the world to come." He would have said the whole truth,

and he would have been entirely right, had he taken time to add, "and in

the world within." "And more," he should have said to Atheist, "much

more in the world within than in any possible world to come." The

Celestial City, every Sabbath-school child begins gradually to

understand, is not up among the stars; till, as he grows older, he takes

in the whole of the New Testament truth that the kingdom of heaven is

wholly within him. You all understand, my brethren, that were we swept

in a moment up to the furthest star, by all that infinite flight we would

not be one hair's-breadth nearer the heavenly city. That is not the

right direction to that city. The city whose builder and maker is God

lies in quite a different direction from that altogether; not by

ascending up beyond sun and moon and stars to all eternity would we ever

get one hand's-breadth nearer God. But if you deny yourself sleep to-

night till you have read His book and bowed your knees in His closet; if,

for His sake, you deny yourself to-morrow when you are eating and

drinking; as often as you say, "Not my will, but Thine be done"; as often

as you humble yourself when others exalt themselves; as often as you

refuse praise and despise blame for His sake; as often as you forgive

before God your enemy, and rejoice with your friend,--Behold! the kingdom

of heaven, with its King and all His shining court of angels and saints

is around you;--is, indeed, within you. No; there is no such place.

Heaven is not in any place: heaven is in a person where it is at all; and

you are that person as often as you put off an earthly and put on a

heavenly mind. That mocking reprobate, with his secret heart all through

those twenty years hungering after the lusts of his youth,--he was wholly

right in what he so unintentionally said; there is no such place in all

this world. And, even if there were, it would spue him and all who are

like him out of its mouth.

2. And, then, in all that universe of things that fills that bottomless

pit and shoreless sea the human heart, there is nothing deeper down in it

than just its deep and unsearchable atheism. The very deepest thing, and

the most absolutely inexpugnable thing, in every human heart is its

theism; its original and inextinguishable convictions about itself and

about God. But, all but as deep as that--for all around that, and all

over that, and soaking all through that--there lies a superincumbent mass

of sullen, brutish, malignant atheism. Nay, so deep down is the atheism

of all our hearts, that it is only one here and another there of the

holiest and the ripest of God's saints who ever get down to it, or even

get at their deepest within sight of it. Robert Fleming tells us about

Robert Bruce, that he was a man that had much inward exercise about his

own personal case, and had been often assaulted anent that great

foundation truth, if there was a God. And often, when he had come up to

the pulpit, after being some time silent, which was his usual way, he

would say, "I think it is a great matter to believe there is a God";

telling the people that it was another thing to believe that than they

judged. But it was also known to his friends what extraordinary

confirmations he had from the Lord therein, and what near familiarity he

did attain to in his heart-converse with God: Yea, truly, adds Fleming,

some things I have had thereanent that seem so strange and marvellous

that I forbear to set them down. And in Halyburton's priceless _Memoirs_

we read: "Hereby I was brought into a doubt about the truths of religion,

the being of God, and things eternal. Whenever I was in dangers or

straits and would build upon these things, a suspicion secretly haunted

me, what if the things are not? This perplexity was somewhat eased while

one day I was reading how Robert Bruce was shaken about the being of God,

and how at length he came to the fullest satisfaction." And in another

place: "Some days ago reading Ex. ix. and x., and finding this, 'That ye

may know that I am God' frequently repeated, and elsewhere in passages

innumerable, as the end of God's manifesting Himself in His word and

works; I observe from it that atheism is deeply rooted even in the Lord's

people, seeing they need to be taught this so much. The great difficulty

that the whole of revelation has to grapple with is atheism; its whole

struggle is to recover man to his first impressions of a God. This one

point comprehends the whole of man's recovery, just as atheism is the

whole of man's apostasy." And, again, in another part of the same great

book, Halyburton says: "I must observe, also, the wise providence of God,

that the greatest difficulties that lie against religion are hid from

atheists. All the objections I meet with in their writings are not

nearly so subtle as those which are often suggested to myself. The

reason of this is obvious from the very nature of the thing--such persons

take not a near-hand view of religion, and while persons stand at a

distance neither are the advantages nor the difficulties of religion

discerned." And now listen to Bunyan, that arch-atheist: "Whole floods

of blasphemies both against God, Christ, and the Scriptures were poured

upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment. Against the very

being of God and of His only beloved Son; or, whether there were, in

truth, a God and a Christ, or no. Of all the temptations that ever I met

with in my life, to question the being of God and the truth of the Gospel

is the worst, and the worst to be borne. When this temptation comes it

takes away my girdle from me, and removeth the foundation from under me."

"Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write."

And John Bunyan looked into his own deep and holy heart, and out of it he

composed this incident of Atheist.

3. It may not be out of place at this point to look for a moment at some

of the things that agitate, stir up, and make the secret atheism of our

hearts to fluctuate and overflow. Butler has a fine passage in which he

points out that it is only the higher class of minds that are tempted

with speculative difficulties such as those were that assaulted Christian

and Hopeful after they were so near the end of their journey. Coarse,

commonplace, and mean-minded men have their probation appointed them

among coarse, mean, and commonplace things; whereas enlightened,

enlarged, and elevated men are exercised after the manner of Robert

Bruce, Thomas Halyburton, John Bunyan, and Butler himself. "The chief

temptations of the generality of the world are the ordinary motives to

injustice or unrestrained pleasure; but there are other persons without

this shallowness of temper; persons of a deeper sense as to what is

invisible and future. Now, these persons have their moral discipline set

them in that high region." The profound bishop means that while their

appetites and their tempers are the stumbling-stones of the most of men,

the difficult problems of natural and revealed and experimental religion

are the test and the triumph of other men. As we have just seen in the

men mentioned above. Students, whose temptations lie fully as much in

their intellects as in their senses, should buy (for a few pence)

Halyburton's Memoirs. "With Halyburton," says Dr. John Duncan, "I feel

great intellectual congruity. Halyburton was naturally a sceptic, but

God gave that sceptic great faith."

Then again, what Atheist calls the "tediousness" of the journey has

undoubtedly a great hand in making some half-in-earnest men sceptics, if

not scoffers. Many of us here to-night who can never now take this

miserable man's way out of the tedium of the Christian life, yet most

bitterly feel it. Whether that tedium is inherent in that life, and

inevitable to such men as we are who are attempting that life; how far

that feature belongs to the very essence of the pilgrim life, and how far

we import our own tedium into the pilgrimage; the fact remains as Atheist

puts it. As Atheist in this book says, so the Atheist who is in our

hearts often says: We are like to have nothing for all our pains but a

lifetime of tedious travel. Yes, wherever the blame lies, there can be

no doubt about it, that what this hilarious scoffer calls the tediousness

of the way is but a too common experience among many of those who,

tediousness and all, will still cleave fast to it and will never leave

it.

Then, again, great trials in life, great straits, dark and

too-long-continued providences, prayer unanswered, or not yet answered in

the way we dictate, bad men and bad causes growing like a green bay tree,

and good men and good work languishing and dying; these things, and many

more things such as these, of which this world of faith and patience is

full, prove quite too much for some men till they give themselves up to a

state of mind that is nothing better than atheism. "My evidences and my

certainty," says Halyburton, "were not answerable to the weight I was

compelled to lay upon them." A figure which Goodwin in his own tender

and graphic way takes up thus: "Set pins in a wall and fix them in ever

so loosely, yet, if you hang nothing upon them they will seem to stand

firm; but hang a heavy weight upon them, or even give them the least jog

as you pass, and the whole thing will suddenly come down. The wall is

God's word, the slack pin is our faith, and the weight and the jog are

the heavy burdens and the sudden shocks of life, and down our hearts go,

wall and pin and suspended vessel and all."

When the church and her ministers, when the Scriptures and their

anomalies, and when the faults and failings of Christian men are made the

subject of mockery and laughter, the reverence, the fear, the awe, the

respect that all enter so largely into religion, and especially into the

religion of young people, is too easily destroyed; and not seldom the

first seeds of practical and sometimes of speculative atheism are thus

sown. The mischief that has been done by mockery and laughter to the

souls, especially of the young and the inexperienced, only the great day

will fully disclose.

And then, two men of great weight and authority with us, tell us what we

who are ministers would have found out without them: this, namely, that

the greatest atheists are they who are ever handling holy things without

feeling them.

"Is it true," said Christian to Hopeful, his fellow, "is it true what

this man hath said?" "Take heed," said Hopeful, "remember what it hath

cost us already for hearkening to such kind of fellows. What! No Mount

Zion! Did we not see from the Delectable Mountains the gate of the City?

And, besides, are we not to walk by faith? Let us go on lest the man

with the whip overtakes us again." Christian: "My brother, I said that

but to prove thee, and to fetch from thee a fruit of the honesty of thy

heart." Many a deep and powerful passage has Butler composed on that

thesis which Hopeful here supplies him with; and many a brilliant sermon

has Newman preached on that same text till he has made our

"predispositions to faith" a fruitful and an ever fresh commonplace to

hundreds of preachers. Yes; the best bulwark of faith is a good and

honest heart. To such a happy heart the truth is its own unshaken

evidence. To whom can we go but to Thee?--they who have such a heart

protest. The whole bent of such men's minds is toward the truth of the

gospel. Their instincts keep them on the right way even when their

reason and their observation are both confounded. As Newman keeps on

saying, they are "easy of belief." They cannot keep away from Christ and

His church. They cannot turn back. They must go on. Though He slay

them they will die yearning after Him. They often fall into great error

and into great guilt, but their seed remaineth in them, and they cannot

continue in error or in guilt, because they are born of God. They are

they in whom

"Persuasion and belief

Have ripened into faith; and faith become

A passionate intuition."