Athiesm

The creed is one of the briefest ever penned — "No God." Its practical result is the saddest ever recorded — "No hope" (Ephesians 2:10). Deprive us of a personal God and you render life an enigma, begun without an author, pursued without a motive, and ending without a hope. Are there any who hold such a gloomy creed? Arrange them into four classes —
1. The heathen, who are ignorant of God. They acknowledge not one God, but many. To them every department of nature has its presiding deity, to whom homage is paid. They have not been enlightened by the beams of revelation. How far are the heathen to blame for continuing in their ignorance? How far are the works of creation a guide to men in finding out God? There is wrapped up in nature a Divine revelation, which mankind may read by exercising their faculties.
2. Atheists, who deny the existence of God. They assume towards Divine things an attitude of active antagonism. Not liking to retain God in their knowledge, they wilfully give themselves over to conduct in defiance of His laws. Their conduct springs from wish rather than conviction. You may shut your eyes to the sunlight, but the sun still shines; you may deny God's existence, but God remains. It may be doubted whether there is such a person as a positive denier of God, an atheist from intellectual conviction. To say "There is no God" necessitates a claim too sweeping for a reasonable man to make, for it implies that he who makes it has himself been in every corner of the universe at one and the same time, and failed to discover the Divine Being. Is anyone prepared to make such a claim?
3. Agnostics, who say we have no knowledge of God. A numerous class. Their creed is a negative one. They differ from atheists in this, that while the creed of pure atheism is positive denial of God, agnosticism consists, roughly speaking, in making no assertion, positive or negative, respecting the Divine existence, but merely in taking up a position of passive intellectual indifference. He simply "does not know"; God has not made Himself known with sufficient clearness. The agnostic creed resolves itself into an attempt to trace everything to natural causes, and thus dispense with the supernatural, and that is virtually to banish God from the universe. The senses are proposed as the test of truth. But to say that all our knowledge comes through the senses is not sound philosophy. Is there no such thing as intuitive knowledge, knowledge that comes to us neither through experience nor through proof? It is idle for the sceptic to talk of the inadequacy of evidence. What he wants is the disposition to weigh the evidence he has got.
4. Nominal Christians, who disregard the claims of God. A sound creed is no sure guarantee for upright conduct. There are sham professors. Among professing Christians there is an alarming amount of practical atheism. A man's denial of God may assume a variety of forms. Application, applying equally to the four classes.
(1)They have no guide in life.
(2)They have no hope in death. We decline to accept a gospel of despair.
(D. Merson, M. A.)

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