60 Natural Salvation. 



common consent of all parties and peoples. Thousands, 

 yes, millions of the dominant race, are convinced that the 

 highest good of all lies in an unselfish federation and or- 

 ganization of all terrestrial interests. But there are the 

 alien races, speaking other tongues and intensely jealous 

 of the dominant race ; and even worse, there are the 

 oppugnant religious systems, each claiming to hold all the 

 truth in the universe, possessing each a supreme deity and 

 sacred ritual of its own, and denouncing the votaries of 

 all other systems as enemies of Good and emissaries of 

 Evil. 



Strangely enough where the converse should hold 

 it is religion which will longest bar the coming of " the 

 kingdom of God ! " Sadly enough, too, it is not those 

 tenets that pertain to life on the earth which have set 

 sectaries so inveterately apart, but doctrines concerning 

 future paradises and gehennas. 



The saddest spectacle which the earth presents is that 

 of the zealot millions ready to carry war and devastation, 

 from continent to continent, in the name of Allah or 

 Jehovah. If the biologist ever utters a prayer it is for 

 human deliverance from religion in the fossil state. If 

 one world-task looks harder than another, it is to redeem 

 the human brain from the incubus of religious indoctrina- 

 tion, and set it natural again, capable once more of a 

 normal perception of truth. Herakles of old might have 

 blanched at that labor. 



