to change metals into gold, he
finds something that covers the earth with wealth. There was a time
when the soothsayer and auger flourished, and after them came the
parson and the priest; and the parson and priest must go. The preacher
must go, and in his place must come the teacher--that real interpreter
of nature. We are done with the supernatural. We are through with the
miraculous and the wonderful. There was once a prophet who pretended
to read in the book of the future. His place was taken by the
philosopher, who reasons from cause to effect--a man who finds the
facts by which he is surrounded and endeavors to reason from these
premises, and to tell what in all probability will happen in the
future. The prophet is gone, the philosopher is here. There was a
time when man sought aid entirely from heaven--when he prayed to the
deaf sky. There was a time when the world depended upon the
supernaturalist. That time in Christendom has passed. We now depend
upon the naturalist--not upon the disciple of faith, but upon the
discoverer of facts--upon the demonstrator of truth. At last we are
beginning to build upon a solid foundation, and just as we progress the
supernatural must die.

Religion of the supernatural kind will fade from this world, and in its
place we will have reason. In the place of the worship of something we
know not of, will be the religion of mutual love and assistance--the
great religion of reciprocity. Superstition must go. Science will
remain. The church, however, dies a little hard. The brain of the
world is not yet developed. There are intellectual diseases the same
as diseases of the body. Intellectual mumps and measles still afflict
mankind. Whenever the new comes, the old protests, and the old fights
for its place as long as it has a particle of power. And we are now
having the same warfare between superstition and science that there was
between the stagecoach and the locomotive. But the stage-coach had to
go. It had its day of glory and power, but it is gone. It went West.
In a little while it will be driven into the Pacific, with the last
Indian aboard. So we find that there is the same conflict between the
different sects and the different schools, not only of philosophy, but
of medicine. Recollect that everything except the demonstrated truth
is liable to die. That is the order of nature. Words die. Every
language has a cemetery. Every now and then a word dies and a