d, it has aroused a good deal of
question and criticism in certain quarters. This must be for one of
three reasons. In the first place, the position which I took may not be
a tenable one. In the second place, it is possible that the views
expressed, being somewhat new and unfamiliar, were not found easy of
apprehension and acceptance. In the third place, it is possible that,
in endeavoring to treat so large a subject, I did not analyze and
illustrate enough to make myself perfectly clear.

At any rate, the matter seems to me of such supreme importance as to
make it worth my while this morning to continue the general subject by
a careful and earnest treatment of the great question of reward and
punishment as applied to feeling, to thought, to conduct, the whole of
human life.

Let me say here at the outset, as indicating the point towards which I
shall aim as my goal, that in the ordinary use of language, in the
popular use of language, I do not believe in either reward or
punishment: I believe only in causes and results. This, as I said, is
the point that I shall aim at. Where shall I begin?

I need to ask you to consider for a moment the state of mind of man, so
far as we can conceive it, when he first wakes up as a conscious being,
and begins to look out over the scene of nature and human life with the
endeavor to interpret facts as they appear to him. Of course, he knows
nothing whatever of what we mean by natural law: he knows nothing of
natural cause and of necessary result. So far as we can discover by our
researches, all the tribes of men about whom we have been able to
gather any information have had a belief, if not in God, at least in
gods, or in spiritual existences and powers that controlled within
certain limits the course of human events. It may have been the worship
of ancestors, it may have been the worship of some great chief of the
tribe; but these invisible beings have been able to help or hurt their
followers, their worshippers; and of course they have been thought of
as governing human life after substantially the same methods that they
used when they were living here in the body.

That is, it has been a magical or arbitrary government of the world
that has been for ages the dominant one in the human mind. People have
supposed that these invisible beings desired them to do certain things,
to refrain from doing certain other things, and they have expected them
to reward or punish them how? By giv