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LETTERS. 241
self to record this in letters of blood. Laborers and arti-.
sans, who believe in God, in his providence and in his
retributive laws, will not drench the cities in blood. Chris-
tian people will not torture their victims, and call down.
upon their own heads and upon their country a sangninary
reaction and civil war. They will insist upon the claims to
political rights which have been awakened in their breast,
and they will also, if necessity should compel them, fight
for them; but they will also know how to pray, and how
to wield the sword of intellect, instead of that of force.
Compelled by the nature of my own mind, which wants to
see things in their inmost necessity, I have asked myself:
Is it not necessary that atheists, such as Helvetius, Thomas
Paine, Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and others like them, should
exist? Is it not ordained by the eternal laws and plans of
Providence, that they should exist and speak? And 1
have been obliged to answer — Yes! Yes, it lies in the na-
ture of thought that it should develop itself, even to the
utmost extremes. Only thereby can they be combated and
vanquished. The thinking atheist serves God as much as
he who acknowledges Him, although in a different way ;
the former, as the negation over which affirmation must
advance, in order to gain corroboration; and the latter, as
this affirmation itself. The former might therefore be
looked upon as the martyr of the idea, and of the thought,
if he were not deficient in that which constitutes the great-
ness of the martyr, namely: temporarily to perish, while
the eternal truth, fer which which he fought, shines in
greater glory, watered by his blood, blessing mankind,
which will ultimately acknowledge in the martyr their
hero and benefactor. But the demagognes of the extreme
left, in point of religion as well as of politics, of whom I
have spoken, shall perish — many of them probably in the
earthquake which they have called forth — without being
able to say: “I fall in defense of the highest truths, as the
servant of God and of mankind, and my work shall remain
16
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