lity or king. There is less government in the United States here
to-day than in almost any other country of the world, a nearer approach
to what the philosopher would call anarchy. Anarchy does not mean
disorder, when a philosopher is talking: it means merely the absence of
external government. And that is the ideal that we are approaching.

Paul says, you know, that the law was made for wicked people, for the
disobedient and the disorderly, not for good people. How many people
are there in New York to-day, for example, who are honest, who pay
their debts, who did not commit a burglary last night, who do not
propose to be false to wife and home, on account of the law, the
existence of courts and police? The great majority of the citizens of
America to-day would go right on being honest and kind and loving and
helpful, whether there were any laws or not. They are not kept to these
courses of conduct by the law. They have learned that these are the
fitting ways of life that these are the things for a man to do; and
they despise themselves if they are less than man. In other words, this
governmental order, which exists as an outside force, at last gets
written in the heart and becomes a law of life.

Now precisely the same process is going on in other departments of the
world: it is going on in religion. And now let me come to religion, and
illustrate the working of the law here. The old types of religious
thought and life and practice, the first ones that the world knew, are
long since outgrown. We regard them as barbaric, as cruel.

We have learned that there are not a million gods of whom we need stand
in awe. We have learned that God is no partial God. We have learned
that God does not want us, as universal man once believed, to sacrifice
the dearest object of our love. We have learned that he does not want
us to sacrifice our first-born child, as the old Hebrews used to, and
the remains of which custom are plainly visible throughout the Old
Testament everywhere. We have left behind these old types of religious
thought and life; but the world has lost nothing in the process. The
world has not left religion behind. The whole process of growth and
development in the sphere of the religious life and the development of
man has been one of outgrowing crude and partial and inadequate
thoughts and feelings about the universe and God and man and duty and
destiny.

We do not care so much about ceremony as the world did once.