A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP 47 



Man said : ' There is a hidden purpose, could we but 

 fathom it, and the purpose is good ; for we must rever- 

 ence something, and in the visible world there is nothing 

 worthy of reverence/ And Man stood aside from the 

 struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come 

 out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed 

 the instincts which God had transmitted to him from 

 his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked 

 God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could 

 be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by 

 which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And 

 seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that 

 thereby the future might be better. And he gave God 

 thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even 

 the joys that were possible. And God smiled ; and 

 when he saw that Man had become perfect in renuncia- 

 tion and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, 

 which crashed into Man's sun ; and all returned again 

 to nebula. 



" ' Yes/ he murmured, ' it was a good play ; I will 

 have it performed again/ 



Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more 

 void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for 

 our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals 

 henceforward must find a home. That Man is the 

 product of causes which had no prevision of the end 

 they were achieving ; that his origin, his growth, his 

 hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the 

 outcome of accidental collocations of atoms ; that no fire, 

 no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can 

 preserve an individual life beyond the grave ; that all 

 the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspira- 

 tion, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are 

 destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar 



