226 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



Practical. In the main to take advantage of even/ action 

 of others, to profit by these actions, to advance ones 

 position by every available means, and especially to 

 take advantage of the ignorance and weakness of 

 others. To buy at the cheapest and to sell at the 

 dearest, icith the necessary result of such a system 

 to the weakest sweating. In a word, NOT to do to 

 others as ice would be done by. 



Atonement. To open a ledger account with the ideal 

 God. Wherein in six days the sins accumulate, this 

 is the credit side of the account. To balance this 

 account by the debit of so many prayers, confessions, 

 and ostentatious ceremony on the seventh day. 

 And then home, dinner and dessert, and a confident 



feeling that the whole duty of man has been performed. 



And then another six days' sin and so on. 



This is religion : as practised in the nineteenth 



the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures 

 we shall rather find everywhere a pitiless, most embittered Struggle 

 of All against All:' (" The History of Creation," Prof. Ernst 

 Haeckel, 1892, vol. i. pp. 18-20.) 



" The divine Creator is degraded to the level of an idealized man, 

 of an organism progressing in development. According to this low 

 conception God is, in fact, nothing more than a ' gaseous vertebrate.' " 

 (Idem, p. 71.) 



1 "The current religion is indirectly adverse to morals, because it 

 is adverse to the freedom of the intellect. But it is also directly 

 adverse to morals by inventing spurious and bastard virtues. One 

 fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human 

 nature. A sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man. 

 Piety and vice frequently live together in the same dwelling, occupying 

 different chambers, but remaining always on the most amicable terms. 

 Nor is there anything remarkable in this. Religion is merely loyalty : 

 it is just as irrational to expect a man to be virtuous because he goes 

 to church, as it would be to expect him to be virtuous because he 

 went to court. His king, it is true, forbids immorality and fraud. 



