itions, religion becomes polytheism at a higher, and monotheism at a
still higher stage. It is not the gods that create men, it is man who
turns the gods into God. "In the image of himself (man) he created Him"
(God), not the opposite way. Monotheism has also suffered changes. It
has dissolved into a pantheism that embraces and permeates the
universe--and it volatilizes day by day. Natural science reduced to myth
the dogma of the creation of the earth in six days; astronomy,
mathematics, physics have converted heaven into a structure of air, and
the stars, once fastened to the roof of heaven in which angels had their
abodes, into fixed stars and planets whose very composition excludes all
angelic life.

The ruling class, finding itself threatened in its existence, clings to
religion as a prop of all authority, just as every ruling class has done
heretofore.[210] The bourgeoisie or capitalist class itself believes in
nothing. Itself, at every stage of its development and through the
modern science that sprang from none but its own lap, has destroyed all
faith in religion and authority. Its faith is only a pretence; and the
Church accepts the help of this false friend because itself is in need
of help. "Religion is necessary for the people."

No such considerations animate Socialistic Society. Human progress and
unadulterated science are its device. If any there be who has religious
needs, he is free to please himself in the company of those who feel
like him. It is a matter that does not concern society. Seeing that the
clergyman's own mind will be improved by work, the day will dawn to him
also when he will realize that _the highest aim is to be man_.

Ethics and morality exist without organized religion. The contrary is
asserted only by weak-minded people or hypocrites. Ethics and morality
are the expression of conceptions that regulate the relations of man to
man, and their mutual conduct. Religion embraces the relations of man
with supernal beings. And, just as with religion, moral conceptions also
are born of existing social conditions at given times. Cannibals regard
the eating of human beings as highly moral; Greeks and Romans regarded
slavery as moral; the feudal lord of the Middle Ages regarded serfdom as
moral; and to-day the modern capitalist considers highly moral the
institution of wage-slavery, the flaying of women with night work and
the demoralization of children by factory labor.[211] Here we have four