of a gloomy religion, which had been the instrument of kings and priests
for the enslavement of their fellow-creatures. As he told his friend
Trelawny, he used the word Atheism "to express his abhorrence of
superstition; he took it up as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance
of injustice." But Shelley believed too much to be consistently
agnostic. He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion--a
kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God
because it was all God--that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy
accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break
through and flood the world with beauty. Shelley can only be called an
Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received
conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of
cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was
an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving
the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless
utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual
heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too
religious and too sanguine to merit either epithet as vulgarly applied.

The negative side of Shelley's creed had the moral value which attaches
to all earnest conviction, plain speech, defiance of convention, and
enthusiasm for intellectual liberty at any cost. It was marred, however,
by extravagance, crudity, and presumption. Much that he would fain have
destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and
beneficial. Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was
visionary, hollow, and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature
philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social
usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense,
which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm.
The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was