h we set out. The Devil makes
us quarrel whether we ought to have schools with or without bigoted
religious teachings; he burns incense to stupefy our senses, lights
candles to obscure our sight, amuses the masses with buffooneries to
prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality,
and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to
the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. Satan in all his
shapes and forms as he rules the world has been described by Goethe as
Egotism. Selfishness is his element and real nature. Selfishness not yet
realizing the divine, because so entirely _humane_ command--"Do unto
others as you wish that they should do unto you." Selfishness is the
only essence of evil. Selfishness has divided men into different
nations, and fosters in them pride, envy, jealousy, and hatred. Mr.
Darwin has shown that one animal preys on the other, that the weaker
species has to yield to the stronger. Goethe again has shown us how the
Evil Spirit drags us through life's wild scenes and its flat
unmeaningness, to seek mere sensual pleasures and to neglect altogether
our higher and better nature, which is the outgrowth of our more
complicated, more highly developed organization. Were we only to
recognise this, our real nature, we should leave less to chance and
prejudices; were we to study man from a physiological, psychological,
and honestly historical point of view, we should soon eliminate
selfishness from among us, and be able to appreciate what is really the
essence of evil. The more nearly we approach Darwin's primitive man, the
ape, the nearer do we draw to the Mephistopheles who shows us his exact
nature with impudent sincerity in Goethe's "Faust."

That which changes our Psyche, that is our intellectual faculty with its
airy wings of imagination, its yearnings for truth, into an ugly,
submissive, crawling worm, is heartless selfishness. Not without reason
is poor guileless Margaret horrified at Mephistopheles. She shudders,
hides herself on the bosom of Faust, like a dove under the wings of an
eagle, and complains that the Evil Spirit--

... Always wears such mocking grin,
Half cold, half grim,
One sees that nought has interest for him;
'Tis writ on his brow, and can't be mistaken,
No soul in him can love awaken.

When all goes wrong, when religious, social, and political animosities and
hatred disturb the peace; when unintelligible controver