hake mankind loose from gossip and pink teas, and
sword-worship, and Saturday night drunks, and self-seeking politics and
theological quibbles--to wake them up and make them realise that they
stand upon a narrow knife-edge between two awful eternities, and that,
here and now, they have to finish with make-beliefs, and with real
earnestness and courage face those truths which have always been
palpable where indolence, or cowardice, or vested interests have not
obscured the vision. Let us try to appreciate what those truths are
and the direction which reform must take. It is the new spiritual
developments which predominate in my own thoughts, but there are two
other great readjustments which are necessary before they can take
their full effect. On the spiritual side I can speak with the force of
knowledge from the beyond. On the other two points of reform, I make
no such claim.

The first is that in the Bible, which is the foundation of our present
religious thought, we have bound together the living and the dead, and
the dead has tainted the living. A mummy and an angel are in most
unnatural partnership. There can be no clear thinking, and no logical
teaching until the old dispensation has been placed on the shelf of the
scholar, and removed from the desk of the teacher. It is indeed a
wonderful book, in parts the oldest which has come down to us, a book
filled with rare knowledge, with history, with poetry, with occultism,
with folklore. But it has no connection with modern conceptions of
religion. In the main it is actually antagonistic to them. Two
contradictory codes have been circulated under one cover, and the
result is dire confusion. The one is a scheme depending upon a special
tribal God, intensely anthropomorphic and filled with rage, jealousy
and revenge. The conception pervades every book of the Old Testament.
Even in the psalms, which are perhaps the most spiritual and beautiful
section, the psalmist, amid much that is noble, sings of the fearsome
things which his God will do to his enemies. "They shall go down alive
into hell." There is the keynote of this ancient document--a document
which advocates massacre, condones polygamy, accepts slavery, and
orders the burning of so-called witches. Its Mosaic provisions have
long been laid aside. We do not consider ourselves accursed if we fail
to mutilate our bodies, if we eat forbidden dishes, fail to trim our
beards, or wear clothes of two materia