had looked for. The prophets had prophesied that the time would come when man should act from a higher motive than dollars and cents, when goodness would be a virtue and would be appreciated: the priests had looked upon all virtue as passion, and had treated it as such. Thus sympathy or love was misrepresented by these blind guides, so that people acknowledged and thought that they were born dishonest, and all kinds of vice and passion were elements of our nature. When Jesus began to separate vice from virtue the war began. This separation was His religion.
Vice and passions were the inventions of man. I will not say brutish, for that is a stain on God or goodness. For the brutes act as they were intended to, and to compare them to man who debases himself below the brute is a stain on the whole character of the horse, for instance. I have seen a thing driving a horse who looked more out of place than he would if he were in the thills and the horse had the reins. This sort of intellect, which is made up of the lowest passions of man, is as much beneath the brute as the hawk is beneath the dove. These two characters make up man. One is ignorance, superstition and all kinds of passion, to gratify the lusts of a low, contemptible mind which cannot see honesty in anything except as a restraint upon the appetites; so he looks upon all restraints as burdens and oppressions. This is the wisdom of this world. This wisdom has always been in the ascendency. It has been the enemy of truth or Science. So when any new development of truth comes up, this brutal intellect catches the seed or idea and puts a low construction on its acts. This causes the war of error, to see which shall get the mastery. Science comes as a natural result of the quarrel. For the truth never makes war for anything. All the fighting is done by ignorance and superstition.
Now, as I have already said, the beasts were made perfect as they were intended to be; no change is visible in each succeeding generation. The combination of the natural brute is perfect. But it does not contain science or wisdom. Man, being what is called the noblest work of God, has a higher development, and shows that there is something outside of matter which can control matter. This something is what the world has always been looking for. It is not in the beasts, for it is not life, and that the beasts have; nor is it reason,
