Chapter 4

Owing to certain questions which I now put with some timidity to Christian evidence lecturers, I was invited to attend the Sunday Morning Adult School Meetings of the Peel Institute, in order to refind Christ. I accepted the invitation only to lose God instead.

In addresses delivered before the members of this local Quaker Brotherhood during the ensuing twelve months, I insisted that man was truly religious only in so far as his outwardly expressed views concurred with his inward outlook on life, and his beliefs were scientifically trained and cultivated. The earlier lectures maintained that the Bible records were historically untrustworthy. Also that the bodily resurrection and divinity of Christ were absurdities. But Theism was true, and the belief in God was based on indisputable facts. Only in so far as it was frankly anti-Christian, however, could this belief be contended for as an essential ingredient of a natural religion and natural theology. Only in so far as it was the center from which to attack all “revelation" was Theism commendable to all rational men. For no sanely religious mind could afford to reverence the fallacies of Christianity whilst keeping at a distance from the orthodox after the manner of the Unitarians.

Belief in God, I argued, demanded a further belief in future existence. The latter, however, I openly admitted, was unsupported by any real evidence, and was, therefore, unscientific; which led back, of course, to my old theme of benefiting mankind here. In any case, this was the best course to pursue. Unlike Mr. Voysey, I denied the objective efficacy of prayer and doubted God's power to attend to it. My inclination was towards a mechanical deism, which I styled Theism and defended with fervor. To promote its growth I acted as a voluntary Theistic Missioner, and distributed literature freely through the post, in addition to running meetings on Clerken-- well Green, and later at Garnault Place. At these a point was made of making no collection, introducing no personalities, and welcoming courteous and vigorous opposition.

This Theistic Missionary work continued from April to September, 1904. The mission then became a Freethought one. I had ceased for ever either to advocate or to believe in the relationship or the life that grew out of the relationship between a personal being called God and a personal being called man. My soul was marching on to an embracement of the cardinal doctrines of Atheism and Agnosticism.

Timidly, I began to question the evidence which was adduced in support of God's existence. I did not deny but simply doubted it. Controversy in the public forum at Hyde Park and elsewhere caused me, in the course of the next few months, to absolutely deny the possibility of any God’s existence, so long as the term God was held to relate to a universally dominating and creating personality. Huxleyan Agnosticism was given up for the wider philosophic agnosticism which declared that no person—since all persons were relative beings--was able to solve the riddle of the universe, the enigma of existence. Hitherto I had been agnostic only to God’s existence, passively atheistic to his practical use. Now I became not merely atheistic for all practical purposes, but militantly netheistic[sic] towards his being and doctrinally agnostic towards the ultimate nature of all being. From a loose heterodoxy I had passed to the embracement of a convincing and consistent philosophy offering the counter-affirmative to the puerile absurdities of theological metaphysics.

It may be urged that I had lost faith only in a personal God, and that this did not necessarily imply the adoption of such an extremely Atheistic attitude as I have chosen to imagine. Possibly I was leaning towards Pantheism, since Pantheists refused to reduce the infinite and incomprehensible to the level of personality and held that the noumenon was not so much impersonal as supra-personal. But this would throw no light on and would have, in fact, nothing to do with the nature of the noumenon. That which is supra-personal must be impersonal. That which is impersonal may be suprapersonal. Such was my reasoning. Seeing, however, that the highest man knows in nature is to be found in those ideals, ideas, and thoughts associated with personality, I failed to see what knowledge he could have of that which was suprapersonal. On the other hand, to describe or define the noumenon as being, from our knowledge of physical science, incompatible with any ideas of a moral creator; and to hold that the underlying principle of being manifested in stellar phenomena was too magnificent to be identified with a personal deity, was to approach the consideration of speculations as to the nature of the underlying impersonal force from two different view points, both of which had their basis in Atheism. To understand this was to be a Netheist, not a Pantheist.