What devil-worshippers those old chaps were!  To him they ascribed all power over things animate and inanimate, and the effrontery of the man who should have even mentioned the possibility of talking over a wire, thousands of miles, or of utilizing the forces of Niagara, or of hundreds of inventions now in use in the most commonplace surroundings would have been met with condign punishment.  Our inventors would be in dungeons instead of their comfortable laboratories, and our great engineers would long ago have lost their heads.  What a time we have had getting the devil out of our mechanical life!  Now he can only rule in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations of the ignorant and superstitious.

DEVIL WORSHIP.

The Infinite Mind is in all things, everywhere what we are not.  Where we are full of impatience, He is calm and unmoved; wherein we grope blindly, He, seeing the end from the beginning, is well content with his own handiwork, and with the final outcome of the souls of his earthly children.  Many of the imperfections and individual shortcomings of people are laid aside in the dark crucible of physical death and the grave.  Such of these tendencies as are carried over into the next plane of being, persisting in the spirit, are there dealt with as disease or ignorance, the results of malformation or bad environment.  God is love, not hate, and “rejoiceth not in the death of the wicked,” nor in the punishment of the wrongly educated; for a large portion of the sin and seeming iniquity of humanity is the result of heredity and of a misunderstanding of the laws of God expressed through nature.  Undoubtedly there have been good men and true among those who sought to interpret God’s law aright and formulate a code for the guidance and discipline of humanity in accordance with justice and equity.  But their premises were all wrong.  They took for their foundation the old Jewish history wherein the God of the Hebrews was always represented as a jealous being, rejoicing in revenge and rapine, and in all that the enlightened world can conceive of as characterizing a devil.  So the modern world has been committed to a devil worship.  Nowhere is the ethical teaching of Jesus recognized in our laws.  It is the old Hebraic attitude toward life and God.

FANATICISM.

Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the prejudices engendered by education, pleasing.  Religion has nothing to do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life.  No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied spirits with those in the form.  That also is wholly controlled by laws inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself into a fixed fact having no more direct bearing upon human affairs than any other form of social intercourse.  It has taught no new code of morals; it has not overthrown, so much as it has revealed the true state of things.  It has revived the spiritual teachings of him by whom the world—­called from him Christian—­professes to be guided and controlled.