MISTAKEN IDEAS OF THE DEITY 173 



is a greater danger to the vitality of a nation than 

 downright scepticism and unbelief. 



THE NEED FOR MORE RATIONAL CREEDS. 



Human nature changes very slowly and only by 

 painful experience. The influences that were most 

 progressive and elevating in the one age, have to be 

 fought and beaten out of the path of progress in the 

 next. The idea that physical power is one of the 

 attributes of deity, and the conception of an all- 

 powerful being directing the universe and the physical 

 affairs of men, has left behind it a legacy of nothing 

 but calamity. According to the scientific definition 

 of truth, which earlier I precisely formulated, there 

 is no such being. The external universe behaves as 

 a machine working automatically according to the 

 laws and principles contained in its own mechanism, 

 and, so far as exact knowledge expends, it does not 

 exhibit a vestige of that arbitrary and purposeful 

 variation that would imply a personality in control. 

 Science, through the personality of men, has in part 

 assumed its control, and never yet has it been inter- 

 fered with or resisted. We hear from well-meaning, 

 but rather unpractical, people that the evils the 

 world suffers from are due to its neglect of God, but 

 surely the worst of them are directly traceable to the 

 enthronement of God in the wrong place. Science 

 has banished the conception of deity for ever from 

 the working of the inanimate world, which behaves 

 in all respects as, and therefore is a simple machine 

 left to go. The task of controlling it is man's, not 

 God's. If through ignorance and incompetence he 

 fails, no personality, vindictive or benevolent, will 

 interfere. The machine will go on in the same way 

 as before, and as, according to geology, it has been 

 going on in a regular uniform manner for aeons 

 before man arrived on the scene. 



2 A 



