LEARNED AND COMFORTABLE, comfortable meaning

comfort-giving, conformant to the soul’s

uncontorted contours; balm for torment,

unless that is your thing. Shelley

played the sermon backwards - the remiss in faith

exonerated by necessity. Surely

the fault is traceable to some transmitter

or receptor, corrigible

by leap of voltage, lightning-therapy?

* * *

This one is for Chloë, whose thoughts on the topic of religious belief (or non-belief) as an incorrigible emotional disposition prompted it.

Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is perhaps better known as the author of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity than he is as the author of A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the certaintie and perpetuitie of faith in the Elect, but a little wilful obscurity never hurt anybody (apart from people whose amour propre is terribly injured every time they are presented with evidence that there is anything at all in the world that they don’t already know all about).

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism argues that it is not reasonable to treat atheism as a crime, as the mental passion of belief is produced - or not, as may be - by the force of the perceptions present to the mind, and is not therefore subject to volition.