In this note, however, I find a valuable admission, which sets the supposed atheism of Mr. Shelley entirely at rest. He says, "It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceived in the universe." This is clear—and the word which Mr. Shelley chooses to employ instead of the word God, to denote the cause of these unknown events, is the word "Necessity!" This brings us to the point from which we set out—to the—
"Father of all, in every age
In every clime ador'd;
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord."
Mr. Shelley's alteration of the text to "Mother," instead of Father, may strike us as very useless, but we can hardly deem it so wicked, as to deserve, "death here, and hell hereafter." Though Lord Bacon prefers atheism to superstition, and says the former may leave a man to the domestic virtues and to science, while the latter makes a wild beast of him; yet a poetical atheist would have been a most ungracious animal—a sort of traitor to his profession, and a heretic to his creed:—and I am happy to have discovered, that Mr. Shelley
