ago have lost their heads. What a time we have
had getting the devil out of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule
in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations of the ignorant and
superstitious.

DEVIL WORSHIP.

The Infinite Mind is in all things, everywhere what we are not. Where
we are full of impatience, He is calm and unmoved; wherein we grope
blindly, He, seeing the end from the beginning, is well content with
his own handiwork, and with the final outcome of the souls of his
earthly children. Many of the imperfections and individual
shortcomings of people are laid aside in the dark crucible of physical
death and the grave. Such of these tendencies as are carried over into
the next plane of being, persisting in the spirit, are there dealt with
as disease or ignorance, the results of malformation or bad
environment. God is love, not hate, and "rejoiceth not in the death of
the wicked," nor in the punishment of the wrongly educated; for a large
portion of the sin and seeming iniquity of humanity is the result of
heredity and of a misunderstanding of the laws of God expressed through
nature. Undoubtedly there have been good men and true among those who
sought to interpret God's law aright and formulate a code for the
guidance and discipline of humanity in accordance with justice and
equity. But their premises were all wrong. They took for their
foundation the old Jewish history wherein the God of the Hebrews was
always represented as a jealous being, rejoicing in revenge and rapine,
and in all that the enlightened world can conceive of as characterizing
a devil. So the modern world has been committed to a devil worship.
Nowhere is the ethical teaching of Jesus recognized in our laws. It is
the old Hebraic attitude toward life and God.

FANATICISM.

Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere
prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations
renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the
prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to
do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life.
No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied
spirits with those in the form. That also is wholly controlled by laws
inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and
cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself
into a fixed fact havin