REAL ATHEISM

The tirades of voluble fanatics, like Mr. Bryan, against the scientific spirit and religious heterodoxy of Harvard, are bound to find another salient of attack. Reverend George H. Thomas of Chicago sponsors the estimate that forty-four hundred eighty students out of forty-six hundred at the University of Tokio are atheists. The so-called atheism of Harvard, of perhaps a half dozen out of the entire student body, is utterly buried beneath this avalanche of revolt in Japan.

This outbreak of rationalism is not to be interpreted too literally. Perhaps it is another protest of the revivified Oriental mind against the same and unreligious institutions which seem inevitably to choke religion. This fresh violence of belief may be the painful force which will free the living core of faith from the incrustations which the centuries attach to it. This protest against authority in the name of intellectual self-assertion may dissolve the effluxes, which stagnate about the fountain of primitive creed.

The dismay of the worthy rector is too close a copy of the early nineteenth century reaction in English universities. The stupid oppression of nearsighted authority drove Shelley from Oxford, when he published a pamphlet on atheism. It could not see that these were the growing pains of vigorous young intellect. It could not foresee that the orthodoxy whose purity they tried to maintain unattached by heresy, would pale gradually before the onslaught of the mind until these cherished tenets of theological metaphysics were held only in the background and with deepest reservations by their apostolic successors, until the science of orthodox apologetics had forsaken its metaphysical subtleties for the less tenuous claim of acting as a social cohesive and a moral leaven.