It exhibits such a view of the character and will of God as may relieve us from the fears and forebodings of guilt, and, by revealing a divine method of reconciliation, may place us in a position the most favorable for a calm and dispassionate consideration of the natural evidence in favor of His Being, Perfections, and Moral Government.
But, while the grand parent cause of all Atheism--whether practical or speculative, dogmatic or skeptical--is to be found in the disordered state of our own moral nature, there are other subordinate causes in operation, which may be regarded either as _incidental occasions_, or as _plausible pretexts_, for this form of unbelief.

The internal causes are the primary and most powerful; but there are external influences which cooeperate with these, and serve to stimulate and strengthen them.

Among the incidental occasions of Atheism, we might mention a defective, because irreligious, education in early life, the influence of ungodly example and profane converse, and the authority of a few great names in literature or science which have become associated with the cause of Infidelity; and among the plausible pretexts for Atheism we might mention the inconsistencies of professed believers and especially of the clergy, the divided state of the religious world, as indicated by the multiplicity of sects, the bitterness of religious controversy, the supposed opposition of the Church to the progress of science and the extension of civil and religious liberty, and the gross superstitions which have been incorporated with Christianity itself in some of the oldest and most powerful states of Europe.

These and similar topics may be justly said to be the "loci communes of Atheism," and they are often employed in eloquent declamation or indignant invective, so as to make a much deeper impression, especially on young and ardent minds, than their intrinsic weight or real argumentative value can either justify or explain.

Infidel writers have not been slow to avail themselves of these pretexts for unbelief, in regard alike to Natural and Revealed Religion; and have artfully identified Religion with Superstition, and Christianity with Popery, as if there were no consistent or tenable medium between the two.