will not lose by going to God instead of to the devil?" — I would cry out as loud as I can, "Go, go to the devil, by all means to the devil!"
It is a hundred times better to get well scalded against the devil than to keep on standing at the cross roads, or insincerely going to God.
.....
I have read Herbert Spencer's reply to Balfour; [1] the profession of Agnos ticism, as they now call Atheism.
I mean, that Agnosticism, although it wishes to be something different from Atheism, by setting up the sup posed impossibility of knowing, yet is, in reality, the same as Atheism, because their common root is the non-accept ance of a God.
.....
And so I read Herbert Spencer, who says, not that he desires to throw off belief in God . . . but that he is obliged to do so; self-deception is the only other alternative. "There is no pleasure," he says, " in the conscious ness of being an infinitesimal bubble on a globe that is itself infinitesimal compared with the totality of things." (I should like to ask him what he understands by "the totality of things.")
"Those on whom the unpitying rush of
- ↑ From an article by Herbert Spencer on "Mr. Balfoor's Dialectics."
