and man. Is not this a need of the age? Without the highest
assurance, it is impossible to put bit and bridle on the social
factions that have been let loose by the spirit of scepticism and
discussion, and which are now crying aloud: 'Show us a way in
which we may walk and find no pitfalls in our way!'

"You will wonder what comparative anatomy has to do with a
question of such importance to the future of society. Must we not
attain to the conviction that man is the end of all earthly means
before we ask whether he too is not the means to some end? If man
is bound up with everything, is there not something above him with
which he again is bound up? If he is the end-all of the explained
transmutations that lead up to him, must he not be also the link
between the visible and invisible creations?

"The activity of the universe is not absurd; it must tend to an
end, and that end is surely not a social body constituted as ours
is! There is a fearful gulf between us and heaven. In our present
existence we can neither be always happy nor always in torment;
must there not be some tremendous change to bring about Paradise
and Hell, two images without which God cannot exist to the mind of
the vulgar? I know that a compromise was made by the invention of
the Soul; but it is repugnant to me to make God answerable for
human baseness, for our disenchantments, our aversions, our
degeneracy.

"Again, how can we recognize as divine the principle within us
which can be overthrown by a few glasses of rum? How conceive of
immaterial faculties which matter can conquer, and whose exercise
is suspended by a grain of opium? How imagine that we shall be
able to feel when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation? Why
must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is the vitality
of matter in its innumerable manifestations--the effect of its
instincts--at all more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is
not the motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's
existence, without our plunging into absurd speculations suggested
by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, from a perishable
state of being to a higher existence, is not that enough for a
creature that is distinguished from other creatures only by more
perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there is not a single
principle which does not lead to the absurd, or cannot be
disproved by evidence, is it