As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact is, every generation has its one or
more over-rated men. Clarke was such in the reign of George I.; Dr.
Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord Byron being the star
now in the ascendant.
In every religious and moral use of the word, God, taken absolutely,
that is, not as a God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a
distinction in kind 'ab omni quod non est Deus', is so essentially
implied, that it is a matter of perfect indifference, whether we assert
a world without God, or make God the world. The one is as truly Atheism
as the other. In fact, for all moral and practical purposes they are the
same position differently expressed; for whether I say, God is the
world, or the world is God, the inevitable conclusion, the sense and
import is, that there is no other God than the world, that is, there is
no other meaning to the term God. Whatever you may mean by, or choose to
believe of, the world, that and that alone you mean by, and believe of,
God. Now I very much question whether in any other sense Atheism, that
is, speculative Atheism, is possible. For even in the Lucretian, the
coarsest and crudest scheme of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a
potential life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated 'lene
clinamen' becoming actual. Desperadoes articulating breath into a
blasphemy of nonsense, to which they themselves attach no connected
meaning, and the wickedness of which is alone intelligible, there may
be; but a La Place, or a La Grand, would, and with justice, resent and
repel the imputation of a belief in chance, or of a denial of law,
order, and self-balancing life and power in the world.
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