16 APRIL 1870, Page 3

A Madrid correspondent of the Times mentions a curious story

of the perhaps half-crazy Atheist republican under sentence of death who so coolly took his seat in the Cortes the other day,— Senor Sutter y Cap-de-vila. When he was smuggled away from the Cortes and out of reach of the authorities, he remarked that it would have been hard to be arrested on his saint's day, where- upon Figueras asked him how it was " he had a saint, not having a God." Figueras might surely have asked a wiser question. How was it M. Comte " had a saint, not having a God " ? Surely in great measure because the great need of a God is apt to compel men of any intensity of nature who have none, to make them- selves the best human substitute in the shape of a saint. A more pertinent source of wonder concerning an Atheist would be, how it is that, having no God, he has not found for himself a substitute in some saintly form.