Our Heavenly Father has never set “metes and bounds” to the souls of his earth children; there is no hidden mystery that cannot be fathomed by them; there is no knowledge withheld from the earnest seeker after truth.  But first of all, the mind must be clarified and set free from the blasphemous superstitions engendered by the crude beliefs taught by theologians.  The developed mind, and reason must arouse to rage and resistance in view of the wreck and ruin of untold millions of lives, the result of false teachings.

ANIMAL LIKENESS.

People have a way of saying of those they admire greatly:  “She has the face of an angel,” or “She is a perfect beauty,” “Beauty beyond compare,” et al, according to their ideas of what constitutes absolute beauty; but the human countenances that have in them no faintest suggestion of the kingdom below us are very rare.  If one looks attentively at the faces of the crowd as it surges along the most attractive street, there may be seen on review surprising resemblances.  A man looking like an elephant, another like a toad, bull dogs and wolves galore, beneficent faces of old people, calm and patient, resembling work-worn horses, always folk of both sexes who suggest sheep,—­now and again a cantankerous billy goat.  You may be sure that the vast numbers of reptiles are not left out of the human representation, and the birds, too.  The “eagle eye,” and the carnivorous beak require no introduction to the menagerie, they belong there.  But the felines have it, the cats, little and big, monopolize the show.  Men regard a recognized resemblance to the king of beasts—­the lion—­a compliment to their natural powers and rightful rulership, while women have to put up with being considered cats, and many of them prove by their cattish doings their resemblance to their animal ancestry.  There are babies everywhere about.  It is disheartening to peer into their tiny faces and see in so many of their eyes no “speculation,” no suggestion of intelligence.  They remind you of the eyes of a fish.

Human beings have through them strains suggestive of the animal kingdom.  It seems quite right to expect each one to act like the creature he resembles, when under the stress of violent emotion.

NATURAL SUPERSTITION.

At the creation of the race there was thrown around it such safeguards as should tend to its continuance.  These were, of course, implanted in the crude mentality of undeveloped man.  Underlying all the rest and the most important to its perpetuation was fear.  The ignorant child has no fear of consequences attendant upon any action; experience teaches him to know what they are, and how to protect himself from them.  This was the first lesson of primitive man, and when, through the exercise of his inventive faculties, he had mastered his visible foes, the animal monsters