464 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. hi. 



adequate for curbing it, must be accepted with resignation 

 as part and parcel of the events which the constitution of 

 our universe necessitates. Such evils, which right living 

 will not guard against, furnish no excuse for ceasing to shun 

 the committal of wiKul wrongs which detract, to a far 

 greater extent, from the fulness of life of ourselves and our 

 fellow-creatures. The sanction by which the religion of the 

 scientific inquirer enforces its ethical code, is the certainty 

 that mal-adjustment will be followed, always by the suffer- 

 ing or degradation of the wrong-doer himself, and usually by 

 the suffering of others who are innocent. And while in this 

 respect there is no essential difference between the Cosmic 

 and the Anthropomorphic theories, on their ethical sides, 

 there is another respect in which the sanction recognized by 

 the former is far more powerful, and must in time become far 

 more effective, than the sanction recognized by the latter. 

 For the current anthropomorphism, in this as in other 

 points betraying its kinship to primeval fetishism, asserts that 

 by repentance and prayer the evil effects of sin may be 

 avoided. The anthropomorphic theist sees in his Deity a 

 being so nearly like himself as to be willing to interfere 

 with the ordinary course of things and dissociate the act ot 

 wrong-doing from its legitimate penalty. As the father puts 

 forth his arm and saves his falling child from the natural 

 consequences of a false step, so it is supposed that God wiU, 

 in certain cases, turn aside the blow which nature has in 

 store for human misdeeds. Science knows of no such inter- 

 ference with the law that pain is consequent upon mal- 

 adjustment. The deed once done will work its full effects, 

 save in so far as checked by counter-actions. He who has 

 swallowed arsenic will be saved, not by praj'er, but by an 

 emetic. He who has yielded to temptation may indeed, by 

 the repentant feeling of which prayer is the expression, 

 secure himself from future yielding; but the tendency to- 

 ward loss of self-control, initiated by the first surreudei 



