OF TH 



FROM THE EVOLUTION PHILOSOPHY. 



reason for believing that those sentiments 

 appropriate to the higher forms of religion. Most 

 people fall into the very pardonable error of living too 

 intensely in the present. They seem to think that because 

 a large majority of persons at the present day find it 

 necessary to worship an anthropomorphic God, this will 

 ever remain a necessity of human nature. No wide- 

 spread belief has so completely obscured man's vision as 

 the fallacy that human nature never changes. History 

 proves most emphatically, not only that human nature does 

 change, but that without such change social progress is 

 impossible. Hence any objection to an idea of a first 

 cause, based on a contrary supposition, need give us little 

 concern. To know how to estimate such strictures at their 

 true value, we have but to remember that, in the eyes of 

 an idolater, the substitution of a mental picture of God for 

 a wooden image might have been made an equally valid 

 ground of complaint. Moreover, it must not be forgotten 

 that this view of a first cause cannot gain a very wide 

 acceptance until men are prepared for it. When that time 

 arrives, a de-anthropomorphic conception of God will 

 certainly find a fit response in the human soul. To attempt 

 to forecast the emotional changes involved in such a 

 remodelling of human nature would be a hazardous under- 

 taking. But of one thing we may be certain. When the 

 first cause ceases to be an object of love and worship as at 

 present understood, those instincts which prompted men 

 to love and worship God will find a much more appropriate 

 sphere of activity. As for 

 peraecutrng_nnr fellow-mem nnf. of Tjpal far 



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begin tp^prjicticfi-JJie moral preceptswhich we have 

 tofore been content with simply preaching; and as for 

 worship, perhapa such of our prevailing religious, forms 



