IN LATER YEARS-1856-1905 571 



sical, revengeful, cruel, and so far from omnipotent that 

 he has to make all sorts of interferences to rectify faults 

 in his original scheme is more and more fading away 

 among the races controlling the world. 



More and more the thinking and controlling races are 

 developing the power of right reason ; and more and more 

 they are leaving to inferior and disappearing races the 

 methods of theological dogmatism. 



More and more, in all parts of the civilized world, is 

 developing liberty of thought ; and more and more is left 

 behind the tyranny of formulas. 



More and more is developing, in the leading nations, 

 the conception of the world s sacred books as a literature 

 in which, as in a mass of earthy material, the gems and 

 gold of its religious thought are embedded; and more 

 and more is left behind the belief in the literal, prosaic 

 conformity to fact of all utterances in this literature. 



To one who closely studies the history of humanity, 

 evolution in religion is a certainty. Eddies there are, 

 counter-currents of passion, fanaticism, greed, hate, 

 pride, folly, the unreason of mobs, the strife of par 

 ties, the dreams of mystics, the logic of dogmatists, and 

 the lust for power of ecclesiastics, but the great main 

 tide is unmistakable. 



What should be the attitude of thinking men, in view 

 of all this! History, I think, teaches us that, just so far 

 as is possible, the rule of our conduct should be to assist 

 Evolution rather than Eevolution. Eeligious revolution 

 is at times inevitable, and at such times the rule of con 

 duct should be to unite our efforts to the forces working 

 for a new and better era; but religious revolutions are 

 generally futile and always dangerous. As a rule, they 

 have failed. Even when successful and beneficial, they 

 have brought new evils. The Lutheran Church, resulting 

 from the great religious revolution of the sixteenth cen 

 tury, became immediately after the death of Luther, and 

 remained during generations, more inexcusably cruel and 

 intolerant than Catholicism had ever been ; the revolution 



