e central figure of Satan, [35]
occupied in champing up souls in his capacious and well-toothed jaws, to
void them again for the purpose of undergoing fresh suffering, we have
the counterpart of the strange Polynesian and Egyptian dogma that there
were certain gods who employed themselves in devouring the ghostly flesh
of the Spirits of the dead. But in justice to the Polynesians, it must
be recollected that, after three such operations, they thought the soul
was purified and happy. In the view of the Christian theologian the
operation was only a preparation for new tortures continued for ever and
aye.

With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of
letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced,
and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the
various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all
of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those
who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not
arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly
imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo,
by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth
century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French
Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing
stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the
eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical
critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century,
until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and
the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more
predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are
parting company.

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture,
whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or
physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary
concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end
of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning--it will cease
to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human
mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify
its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as
full of this particular form o