Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalms 14:1

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." A wise man, that lives up to the principles of reason and virtue, if one considers him in his solitude as taking in the system of the universe, observing the mutual dependence and harmony by which the whole frame of it hangs together, beating down his passions, or swelling his thoughts with magnificent ideas of providence, makes a nobler figure in the eye of an intelligent being, than the greatest conqueror amidst the pomp and solemnities of a triumph. On the contrary, there is not a more ridiculous animal than an atheist in his retirement. His mind is incapable of rapture or elevation: he can only consider himself as an insignificant figure in a landscape, and wandering up and down in a field or a meadow, under the same terms as the meanest animals about him, and as subject to as total a mortality as they, with this aggravation, that he is the only one amongst them who lies under the apprehension of it. In distresses he must be of all creatures the most helpless and forlorn; he feels the whole pressure of a present calamity, without being relieved by the memory of anything that is past, or the prospect of anything that is to come. Annihilation is the greatest blessing that he proposes to himself, and a halter or a pistol the only refuge he can fly to. But if you would behold one of these gloomy miscreants in his poorest figure, you must consider him under the terrors or at the approach of death. About thirty years ago, I was a shipboard with one of these vermin, when there arose a brisk gale, which could frighten nobody but himself. Upon the rolling of the ship he fell upon his knees, and confessed to the chaplain, that he had been a vile atheist, and had denied a Supreme Being ever since he came to his estate. The good man was astonished, and a report immediately ran through the ship, that there was an atheist upon the upper deck. Several of the common seamen, who had never heard the word before, thought it had been some strange fish; but they were more surprised when they saw it was a man, and heard out of his own mouth, "That he never believed till that day that there was a God." As he lay in the agonies of confession, one of the honest tars whispered to the boatswain, "That it would be a good deed to heave him overboard." But we were now within sight of a port, when of a sudden the wind fell, and the penitent relapsed, begging all of us that were present, as we were gentlemen, not to say anything of what had passed. He had not been ashore above two days, when one of the company began to rally him upon his devotion on shipboard, which the other denied in so high terms, that it produced the lie on both sides, and ended in a duel. The atheist was run through the body, and after some loss of blood, became as good a Christian as he was at sea, till he found that his wound was not mortal. He is at present one of the free-thinkers of the age, and now writing a pamphlet against several received opinions concerning the existence of fairies. Joseph Addison (1671 - 1719), in "The Tattler."

Verse 1: —

"'There is no God,' the fool in secret said:

There is no God that rules or earth or sky.'

Tear off the band that binds the wretch's head,

That God may burst upon his faithless eye!

Is there no God? —The stars in myriads spread,

If he look up, the blasphemy deny;

While his own features, in the mirror read,

Reflect the image of Divinity.

Is there no God? —The streams that silver flows,

The air he breathes, the ground he treads, the trees,

The flowers, the grass, the sands, each wind that blows,

All speak of God; throughout, onne voice agres,

And, eloquent, his dread existence shows:

Blind to thyself, ah, see him, fool, in these!" Giovanni Cotta.

Verse 1: —

"The owlet, Atheism,

Sailing on obscene wings across the noon,

Drops his blue-fringed lids, and shuts them close,

And, hooting at the glorious sun in heaven,

Cries out, 'Where is it'" Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834.