This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded.  It has outgrown anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature, open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations.  “There is only one kind of prayer,” it says, “which is reasonable, and that is the deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a quiet determination to ‘make our lives sublime.’  Before our own high ideals, before those lives which show us ’how high the tides of Divine life have risen in the human world,’ we stand with hushed voice and veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare struggle to excel.  The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles.  The other part of prayer is work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.  Study nature’s laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]

To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct.  In 1874 this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the “True Basis of Morality,” and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man to man.  No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my public career.  Speaking of the danger lest “in these stirring times of inquiry,” old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new ones were firmly established, I wrote:  “It therefore becomes the duty of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the superstitions which enslave men’s intellect, to beware how he uproots sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet, however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime....  That