Popularly regarded as an attempt to achieve holy ends by unholy means, but really and radically the apotheosis of falsehood and unreality to the dethronement of faith in the true, the genuine and the real, a deliberate shutting of the eyes to the truth, a belief in a lie in the name of God, a belief in symbols and formulas as in themselves sacred, salutary, and divine, fiction superseding fact, and fancy faith in God or the divine reality of things, the embodiment of the genius of cant persuading itself to believe that that which is not is, while atheism, on the other hand, tries to persuade itself to believe that that which is is not.