_ Phantasms it may produce,--the gladder surely shall I be,
and not the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader,
Advanced-Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all
religion past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same
Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining;--which
certainly the 'Phantasms' and the 'turbid media' were not essential
for! All religion was here to remind us, better or worse, of what we
already know better or worse, of the quite _infinite_ difference there
is between a Good man and a Bad; to bid us love infinitely the one,
abhor and avoid infinitely the other,--strive infinitely to _be_ the
one, and not to be the other. 'All religion issues in due Practical
Hero-worship.' He that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a
religion; he that has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for
salt, will never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to
preach him one.

But indeed, when men and reformers ask for 'a religion,' it is
analogous to their asking, 'What would you have us to do?' and
suchlike. They fancy that their religion too shall be a kind of
Morrison's Pill, which they have only to swallow once, and all will be
well. Resolutely once gulp-down your Religion, your Morrison's Pill,
you have it all plain sailing now: you can follow your affairs, your
no-affairs, go along money-hunting, pleasure-hunting, dilettanteing,
dangling, and miming and chattering like a Dead-Sea Ape: your
Morrison will do your business for you. Men's notions are very
strange!--Brother, I say there is not, was not, nor will ever be, in
the wide circle of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character. Man
cannot afford thee such; for the very gods it is impossible. I advise
thee to renounce Morrison; once for all, quit hope of the Universal
Pill. For body, for soul, for individual or society, there has not any
such article been made. _Non extat._ In Created Nature it is not, was
not, will not be. In the void imbroglios of Chaos only, and realms of
Bedlam, does some shadow of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor
inhabitants _there_.

Rituals, Liturgies, Creeds, Hierarchies: all this is not religion; all
this, were it dead as Odinism, as Fetishism, does not kill religion at
all! It is Stupidity alone, with never so many rituals, that kills
religion. Is not this still a World? Spinning Cotton under Arkwright
and Adam Smith; founding Cities by the Fountain of Juturn