256 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



independence of God. The inter-dependence of 

 all the members of the body social, and the crime 

 of isolating the part from the whole, or making 

 one's self an exception, all this a man may be willing 

 to admit. But then the pride which has been 

 ousted from his individual life reappears when he 

 thinks of himself in his universal character : 



Hence man's perpetual struggle, night and day, 



To prove he was his own proprietor 



And independent of his God, that what 



He had might be esteemed his own, and praised 



As such. He laboured still and tried to stand 



Alone, unpropped to be obliged to none. 



And in the madness of his pride he bade 



His God farewell, and turned away to be 



A God himself. 



Here again the theory is rarely stated, though it 

 is the ultimate major premiss of much of our 

 reasoning. Few will dare to say plainly, as was 

 said recently by a well-known Positivist, that the 

 worship of God has in our day given place to 

 the worship of man ; and yet we are vainly trying 

 to construct a system in which man, not indeed 

 as an individual, but as conscious reason, shall be 

 the centre of all that is. We assume the complete- 

 ness, the self-sufficiency of man if only he can be 

 brought to his highest level. And if God touches 

 man at all it is but at the outer edge of his life, 

 religion being treated as a graceful embellishment 

 of some lives, in some even a help to morality, but 



