rafters of so-called democracy, into the
dust-heap of oblivion, with all the priestly phantoms that have obscured
the sun and blackened the sky. The gods have gone, but MAN IS HERE.

* * * * *

The plagues that befell the Egyptians were the natural ones to which
Egypt was liable: drought, flood, flies, lice, frogs, disease. The
Israelites very naturally declared that these things were sent as a
punishment by the Israelitish god. I remember a farmer, in my childhood
days, who was accounted by his neighbors as an infidel. He was struck by
lightning and instantly killed, while standing in his doorway. The
Sunday before, this man had worked in the fields, and just before he was
killed he had said, "dammit," or something quite as bad. Our preacher
explained at length that this man's death was a "judgment." Afterward,
when our church was struck by lightning, it was regarded as an accident.

Ignorant and superstitious people always attribute special things to
special causes. When the grasshoppers overran Kansas in Eighteen Hundred
Eighty-five, I heard a good man from the South say it was a punishment
on the Kansans for encouraging Old John Brown. The next year the
boll-weevil ruined the cotton crop, and certain preachers in the North,
who thought they knew, declared it was the lingering wrath of God on
account of slavery.

Three nations unite to form our present civilization. These are the
Greek, the Roman and the Judaic. The lives of Perseus, Romulus and Moses
all teem with the miraculous, but if we accept the supernatural in one
we must in all. Which of these three great nations has contributed most
to our well-being is a question largely decided by temperament; but
just now the star of Greece seems to be in the ascendant. We look to art
for solace. Greece stands for art; Rome for conquest; Judea for
religion.

And yet Moses was a lover of beauty, and the hold he had upon his people
was quite as much through training them to work as through his moral
teaching. Indeed, his morality was expediency--which is reason enough
according to modern science. When he wants them to work, he says, "Thus
saith the Lord," just the same as when he wishes to impress upon them a
thought.

No one can read the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth
chapters of Exodus without being impressed with the fact that the man
who wrote them had in him the spirit of the Master Workman--a King's
Craftsman. His