out by degrees to its natural results, tends to destroy the very first principles of religion in the soul, separates man in thought and heart from his God, makes him a god to himself, a self-worshiper. Thence springs pride, contempt of others, enmity, hatred, revenge, and manifold other evils; for, as already shewn, self love is the root of all evil.
That this was one of the great origins of evil in the human heart—and, indeed, the chief one—is manifest from what we see around us at this day; for the same principles that operated to produce evil in the beginning, are still and ever operating; for the mind of man is essentially the same, now as then, with the difference, that the tendency to evil is now far greater, because he inherits through his parents and ancestors a distorted and perverted nature and disposition. What is the source of all atheism, at the present day, but the fact that God is invisible, and that it appears to man as if his powers and faculties of mind and body were all absolutely his own, and that his very life is self-derived? He sees no God with his material eyes, and therefore he affirms that there is no God; he perceives no Divine Fountain above him, whence the stream of life is flowing into his bosom, and hence he asserts that there is no such Fountain, but that the spring of life is within himself: Hence he denies the existence of God, and becomes a god to himself: he plunges into the Stygian abyss of materialism and self-worship. But the amount of practical, is far greater than of theoretic, atheism. Every man who is wrapped up in his own self-conceit, is a practical atheist. Whatever he may believe in theory and in the abstract, he does not truly acknowledge
