ism. Secularism, however, is at a disadvantage at
this stage of our mental development, since it is approached only by the
calm light of the intellect. And intellect can but make an appeal to
reason. If the seeds of these appeals fall on the fertile minds of
mentally advanced humanity, they will flourish; if they fall on the
barren ground of creed-bound minds, they take no root. Recognition of
facts and honest deductions are not natural to the human mind. As far as
religious matters are concerned, the vast majority of men have not
reached a mental maturity; they are still in the infantile state where
they have not as yet learned that the sequences of events are not to be
interrupted by their desires. The easier path lies in the giving way to
the unstable emotions. The primitive instincts are for emotion and for
loose imaginings, and these are the provinces of supernaturalism.

Supernaturalism arouses the stupid interests and the brutish passions,
and from these are born the bitter fruits of ignorance and hatred. The
secularist is one in whom the intellect is passionate, and the passions
cold. The supernaturalist on the other hand reverses the order, and in
him the passions are active and the intellect inert. In each man there
dwells a tyrant who creates for him a deity materialized out of these
factors of ignorance and fear. It is science and reason which must
destroy for him this monstrous apparition. But, as yet, there is no
indication that our mental development in relation to social progress
has made the great strides that our purely material progress has made.
The twentieth century man utilizes and enjoys the material benefits of
his century, but his mental progress lies bound and drugged by the
viewpoints of 2000 years ago.

Sir Leslie Stephen has declared, "How much intellect and zeal runs to
waste in the spasmodic efforts of good men to cling to the last fragment
of decaying systems, to galvanize dead formulae into some dim semblance
of life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be
leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes
passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive
to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture
for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to
look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in
cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much