He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.

His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction.

The Sabaean, or Manichaean theory of a Good and an Evil Principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no one revived it in our time.

He would have regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed to it no depraving influence.

As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil.