winked at a little thieving on his own account. He has grown better since, not by any innate tendency, but because the outside, common sense morality of the world insisted that unless he did change, he would be thrown entirely overboard. So the Christians' god has slowly conformed to the increasing morality of man. It has always, however, been behind the times, and not ahead. It has never initiated a single reform. It has never given a new commandment; that has always come from the heart of man; and God has opposed it until it became popular, and then he has thundered in its praise. God, instead of being in any sense the creator of morality, has simply been its courtier, its flatterer, its supple slave; and so the gods have always the vices of a slave. They always curse the "new morality," and have no more sympathy with virile ethics than a doll has with a growing child; and one might just as well say that a doll is necessary to the growth and beauty of the child that holds it as to say that a god is necessary to the moral progress of the race. The progress goes on, whether the gods will or no; and the gods are just as often found upon the wrong side as upon the right side, and, like us poor mortals, their hindsight is vastly better than their foresight. The gods, like the priests, only furnish the millinery of ethics. The growing body itself springs from the pulse of universal humanity, and its naked grandeur far surpasses the embroideries of heaven.

Again, while we find that the gods and religions have been off and on with a genuine morality, now for it, and now against it, they have ever been the foe of science. True knowledge has always had to battle them. They have ever been the fast friends of ignorance. In itself, simply as feeling, religion may not be opposed to science, but as a matter of fact, in its historic expression, it has always been opposed to science. There has been from time immemorial a bitter antagonism. This has been most conclusively shown in Draper's "Conflict of Science and Religion." We may so define religion that it may harmonize with knowledge, but the gods which have actually swayed the minds of men have fought against every inch of advancement. Science has never found a single helper in any of those dark deities. Astron.

omy, geology, chemistry, the railroad, the electric telegraph, have come by human grit, and never by celestial assistance. No god has ever led the way. Whenever a god undertakes to lead, there is a forty-years' wandering in the wilderness; it is science that cuts its way into the promised land. There is no reason why we should be grateful to the gods; rather should the gods be thankful that humanity has allowed them to exist so long as it has in their lazy dignity. Such leniency is entirely misplaced, for the "aristocracy of the skies" have ever been a bar to discovery. They have dreaded the light; they have opposed investigation; they have wanted the human race "tied up," for they have ever felt that more truth was fatal to their supremacy. It is possible that by a plentiful use of the dictionary, religion may be transformed into an angel of light, but in the past it has been an angel of darkness, and has loved to hover in the midnight of ignorance, thinking that there only it could wing its happy flight; and so on every occasion it has summoned its innumerable divinities to push back the rushing dawn, but, like Dame Partington, they have always had to give up and let the mighty ocean of human progress have its own sweet way.

Finally, we find that of whatever apparent use the gods and religions might have been in the olden time, they are now eternally to be put aside. They can no longer minister even. to the fancy of men. Even as dolls they are "played out." Mankind has now advanced to pure science. The heavens are now cleared of deities, and the sun and stars alone pursue their majestic way. Man is the highest conscious intelligence which we know anything about. There is neither one god nor many gods. There is simply the universe with its manifold capacities and amazing infinitude. There is endless force and the magnificent transformations of matter. There is the potency of man impinging upon crude material with creative energy and new and beautiful order. This is all we have. It is enough for immortal progress. Instead of a thousand changing gods we have vast imperial nature sweeping on in unutterable music and light; we have the sturdy hand of science unlocking a million secrets; we have the brow of man wearing fresh laurels from day to day. We bid farewell

to the pantheon and take up our abode in the temple of humanity, where we no longer worship, but work; where we dwell in the light of reason, of simple human friendship, rejoicing in the beauty of earth and disdaining the imaginary splendors of heaven almost forgotten in the magnificence of nature's advancement and improvment.

Such are some of the rich and valuable lessons derived from a survey of this work. After this look into "the backvard and abysm of time" our forward look is more splendid and inspiring. We traverse the dim fields of the past, trace the wreck of many a colossal god, see the gold mingled with the dust, and from the weird, fantastic scene take the hand of science with more noble confidence, and contemplate her starry brow with more elated mind. This admirable study of the past gives fresh impetus to our progress. What the gods have vainly tried to do we will accomplish. Whatever gleams of promise and delight they have flashed forth from the infinite. bosom of nature we will makes more illustrious and more fruitful still. Laying aside the errors and superstitions of the childhood of the race, we will still preserve its fresh vitality. The poetry, the beauty, the romance, the glory, of the gods have not passed away; they shine in more sublime and beneficent achievements, for the only god we now have is the endless universe itself, and the only creator that shapes, combines, modifies, and makes more entrancing and useful the myriad forces about us, is that supreme intelligence that finds its throne in the brain of man and its angels in his skilful fingers.

INDEX.

Anchorites, Hindoo, ii, 141-145; Thi- Aurelius, Marcus, ii, 420