MEN AND TREES 



grown bolder and bolder in dealing with its deities 

 and its devils. A few heroic spirits have always 

 questioned the truth of the popular creeds, but in 

 our day a very large majority question or even deny 

 them. Fear of the wrath above or the wrath below 

 has fled. Men are fast coming to see that devotion 

 to the truth is the essence of true religion, and that 

 the worst form of irreligion is the acceptance of 

 creeds and forms without examining them, or upon 

 the sole authority of some book or sect. The truth- 

 loving man is the God-loving man. We no longer 

 talk of God-fearing men — this negative attitude 

 has given place to the positive attitude of love and 

 enjoyment. The wrath of God no longer makes us 

 tremble. The swift and sure vengeance of violated 

 law, both in the physical world without us and the 

 physiological world within us, we understand and 

 appreciate, but the fury and revenge of the offended 

 gods no longer disturb our dreams. Nature has no 

 mercy, is no respecter of persons, is one to the just 

 and the unjust. Only the moral nature of man 

 knows right from wrong; only the reason of man 

 knows truth from falsehood. When or how man got 

 this moral and intellectual nature is a question upon 

 which men themselves will never agree. Did it come 

 from without or from within — through evolution 

 or revelation? The naturalist or naturist is bound to 

 believe that it came from within through the long 

 process of evolution. Whatever favored man's de- 



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