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III.

THE ATHEISTIC LIFE.

"Having no hope, and without God in the world."—Eph. ii. 12. THE value of human life in any generation may be measured, on the whole, by its faith in God. Life grows cheap as sense grows masterful, and as faith, and the hope that is born from faith, expire. It may help us to understand the sphere of being to which man truly belongs, and in which alone he can complete his life, to note that a sensual age, instead of clinging to life more fondly for the sake of its pleasures, comes to curse it as a dire endowment, and to escape from it joyfully even into the everlasting night. Life had become next to worthless in the estimation of the ablest men in the Roman Empire, in the age in which the apostles relaid the foundations of human society in man's spiritual relations to his fellow man, to the unseen world, and to God. So long as man was regarded as the centre of his sphere, man's life became impoverished generation by generation, until in the age of the Advent human life seems to have touched its nadir, its minimum of value to the man and to mankind.

E

The Emperor Tiberius was probably one of the ablest men who has ever occupied a throne. His state papers, if we may use the term, some of which are preserved to us, are singularly luminous and masterly. Yet it was the Emperor Tiberius, the world's undisputed master, who wrote to the Senate these terrible words: "May all the gods and goddesses, if there be any, damn me worse than I am damned already, if I know what to write to you.' Seneca, whose intuitions of spiritual truth have suggested to theologians the baseless idea that he must have become acquainted with the teaching of the Apostle Paul, if ever he grows enthusiastic, grows enthusiastic upon suicide. Epictetus, individually a far nobler man, utters, in the most intense passage of his writings, a bitter wail over the impossibility of finding a man who was trying, with even a decent measure of success, to live after the pattern which, in his judgment, could alone make life worth the living at all.

In an earlier generation Lucretius, quite the deepest thinker and the loftiest genius among all the Roman poets, wrote a poem of marvellous beauty and power, in which he proved that the whole mythology of Rome lay about as near as old wives' fables to the heart of the mystery of the Creation. He did much, perhaps more than any other man, to shatter the ancient belief about the origin and the government of the world, which still stood between many a sad heathen heart and the hopeless exclamation, "What is truth?" He developed the idea that a fortuitous

concourse of atoms was the key to the order of the Creation.

Namque ita multimodis multis primordia rerum
Ex infinito jam tempore percita plagis,
Ponderibusque suis consuêrunt concita ferri,
Omnimodisque coire, atque omnia pertentare,
Quæcunque inter se possint congressa creare,
Ut non sit mirum si in taleis disposituras
Deciderunt quoque, et in taleis venere meatus

Qualibus hæc rerum genitur nunc summa novando.-B. v. 188.

He gave a picture of the inner order of the Creation which left no room for man as a moral and immortal being, which made responsibility a superstition, and immortality a dream; and then with all his splendid faculty and promise, in the very prime of his manhood, at the age of forty-four, he killed himself out of such a world!

"Gallio cared for none of these things." Gallio was one of the most perfectly accomplished, admirable, loveable men, if Seneca may be trusted, in the whole Roman Empire. A complete and graceful scholar, a masterly administrator, a friend whom his friends held in the highest honour and love, he was everything and he had everything which could dignify and embellish life, except that which Paul was and had. But for this he had no care. The deep thoughts about God, about life, about man's nature and destiny, with which Paul was charged, he would regard as a poor and base superstition. The mission which was burning in Paul's great heart, and which made him. a debtor to the whole world to preach to it the Gospel, was a thing quite outside the sphere of his

thoughts. He cared to cultivate his faculties, to enjoy philosophical discussion with his friends, to repress wrong and wicked lewdness in the region over which he ruled with a touch of lofty Roman scorn; but for the truth, the power, the life, with which that Jew was charged whom he drave with the rest from before his judgment-seat, he had no recognition; he was blind to it all as was Pilate to Christ; and Gallio too finished his brilliant career by suicide.

Now these men whom I have mentioned were among the very foremost men in the world in their times. They were the ablest, the wisest, the most distinguished; the men in whom we might most fairly hope to see the spirit of the times reflected, and by whose way of living and thinking about life, we might gain the best insight into the thoughts of the undistinguished mass who leave no definite record of themselves in history. And their witness is a profoundly sad one, and true as it is sad; for every when and every where the student of history notes that life grows sad in itself and worthless to men, just in the measure in which it seems to them that they have only this world to live for, and nothing to do in it but to speculate and to enjoy. An atheistic age inevitably comes in the end to make light of life.

And I note a very clear tendency to cheapen life, to make light of it, and of the sanction by which its sacred treasure is guarded, in the atheistic literature of our times. There are hints, and something more

than hints, that suicide may be regarded as an open question, and that life may be mercifully shortened to avoid inevitable pain, in periodicals conducted and written by some of the ablest intellectual men of the day. Now, one of the most marked of the earlier fruits which Christianity bore to the world, was the bound that it set to the age of suicide and infanticide. The age of the first Cæsars was emphatically the age of the suicides. Tacitus tells us of a man who simply killed himself in indignation that he had been born! Even the easy, complacent Horace, the pet poet of the Augustan Court, could only say of his times :—

Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
Ætas parentum, pejor avis, tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.

It was a time when a favourite topic of discussion was the easiest means of escaping into the valley of the shadow of death, whatever that might be, as better in any case for a man, than such a world

as this. To this propensity, I may almost say,

passion for suicide, Christianity set a bound at once. I do not mean to say that it had not a hard battle with it; but it shewed at once, within the wide circle of its converts, its victorious power. There was evidently ample power there, the power of faith and hope, to master it.1 And the glow of the hope which Christianity had kindled, spread far beyond its pale,

1 It is curious enough that Christianity had before long to deal with a tendency to suicide within the Church, in the form of voluntary martyrdom; which was suicide through excess of hope.