approach and win the favour of such a being have constituted the heaviest drag on civilization and progress; and, as man rises in the sphere of rationality, the highest lesson he can learn is to discard definitively all such dreams. He must convince himself that there is nothing divine, nothing supernatural, no providence but his own, that prayer is futile, piety impossible; and the sage may postulate that humanity is God until some higher divinity be discovered. The mythological terrors of antiquity are effete in the world of to-day, and any citizen who has learned to live uprightly should be above all religion, and free from the bondage of every superstition. By self-reliance and his own exertions alone can man be led upwards; his advancement depends on the extent to which he can penetrate the mystery of, and subdue the forces which surround him; and to preach the dominion of man over nature is the work of the modern prophet or apostle.[1] By a retrospect of the past he is justified in cherish-*
- [Footnote: of this solar system, there would seem to be much superfluous expenditure
of power and materials. The conception of God, when cleared of all irrelevancy, is merely that of a perpetual source of energy; and that we must find in the medium we exist in or nowhere. It is nugatory to talk of beginnings and endings when dealing with the infinite, unless as regards phases of phenomena; if there had to be an end of the universe, there would never have been a beginning.]*
- ↑ Amongst some follies, the Stoic philosophers, in their pantheistic conception of nature, reached the highest level which has yet been attained in the expression of theocratic dogma. With them, the universe is the very body of the divine essence, and the good and wise man is in no way inferior to the sublimest manifestation of it. He is rightly called a god upon earth, and his intellect is an efflux of the Deity. "Back to the Porch for your ideas of God and nature," the modern philosopher may cry to his age. "You are gods yourselves, and nature is your realm to conquer and hold in subjection." The religion of the future will be more akin to Stoicism than to any other doctrine which has been formulated by thinkers in the past—a high ethical code upheld by a pride of
