title: The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays (Freethought Library)
author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
description: <b>Percy Bysshe Shelley </b>(1792 - 1822) was a renowned literary figure, whose reputation was established at a young age by the publication of <i>Queen Mab</i> (1813);<i> Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude</i>; <i>Mont Blanc </i>(both written in 1816); and <i>The Revolt of Islam </i>(1817). He was a friend of the poet Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, the essayist and bold defender of the Romantics, including Shelley, Byron, and John Keats. After his second marriage to Mary Godwin (who would win her own fame as the author of <i>Frankenstein</i>), Shelley moved permanently from England to Italy in 1818, and there wrote his greatest works, among them "Ode to the West Wind" (1819) and <i>Prometheus Unbound</i> (1820). His life was tragically cut short when he drowned in a boating accident off the northwest coast of Italy, near Viareggio, on July 8, 1822.
zlib_text: THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM   
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  1 
   
  The Necessity of Atheism 
   
  By Percy Bysshe Shelley 
   
   
   
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  THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM   
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  2 
   
                        
   
   
                              FOREWORD 
                          BY HENRY S. SALT 
   
  As a brief summary of Shelley's attitude toward the Christian religion, I may be allowed to quote from what 
  I have written elsewhere. [Percy Bysshe shelley, Poet and Pioneer (Watts & Co., 1913]  
  "I regard Shelley's early 'atheism' and later Pantheism, as simply the negative and the 
  affirmative side of the same progressive but harmonious life-creed. In his earlier years 
  his disposition was towards a vehement denial of a theology which he never ceased to 
  detest; in his maturer years he made more frequent reference to the great World Spirit in 
  whom he had from the first believed. He grew wiser in the exercise of his religio