idol,—"It is nothing." He will not be an atheist, but a theist all the more. The superior conception of God always nullifies the inferior conception.
Thus as the world grows in its development, it necessarily outgrows its ancient ideas of God, which were only temporary and provisional. As it goes forward, the ancient deities are looked on first as devils; next as a mere mistaken notion which some men had formed about God. For example, a hundred years ago it was the custom of the learned men of the Christian church to speak of the Heathen deities,—Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and the rest,—as devils. They did not deny the actual existence of those beings, only affirmed them to be not Gods but devils or "fallen angels;" at any rate, evil beings. Some of the heretics among the early Christians said the same of the Hebrew Jehovah, that he was not the true God, but only a devil who misled the Jews. Now-a-days well-educated men who still use the terms, say that Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and the others, were only mistaken notions which men formed of God. They deny the actuality of the idea, "Jupiter is nothing." A man who has a higher conception of God than those about him, who denies their conception, is often called an atheist by men who are less theistic than he. Thus the Christians who said the Heathen idols were no gods, were accounted atheists by the people, and accordingly put to death. Thus Jesus of Nazareth was accused of blasphemy, and crucified by men who had not a tithe of the religious development and reverence for God which he possessed. The men who centuries ago denied the actuality of the Trinity were put to death as atheists—Servetus among the rest, John Calvin himself tending the flames.
At this day the Devil is a part of the popular Godhead in the common theology, representing the malignant element which still belongs to the ecclesiastical conception of Deity. If a man says there is no devil, he is thought to be, if not an atheist, at least very closely related to an atheist. He denies a portion of the popular Godhead; is constructively an atheist; an atheist as far as it goes; atheistic in kind, as much as if he denied the whole Godhead, when he would obviously be branded an atheist.
I use the word Atheism in quite a different sense. It
