GOVERNMENT AND SCIENCE 209 



not reward him with an increase of wisdom any more than he 

 did the mammoth creation that preceded him. You can 

 prevent crime, waste and folly, but you cannot convert the 

 sinner, make the extravagant careful and temperate, or give 

 wisdom to the foolish except by preventing the criminal from 

 breeding, compelling the lazy to work, and teaching the foolish 

 that poverty and want are the results of loss and failure, 

 to teach us that our opportunities must be turned to wisdom 

 and virtue. By religion we can save, calling into effect the 

 more cumbersome action of state legislation. 



For state government is a higher form of develop- 

 ment than religious control, but religion is the brake or check 

 of misgovernment ; so religion can only, so long as it is 

 possible, rule the masses of the people by superstition and 

 supernatural fear, and do away with the necessity for im- 

 prisonment, which deprives the community of the temporary 

 use of the labour of the criminal, or of capital punishment, 

 which deprives the state of his existence and labour. Thus 

 we find religions are made the cloaks to cover crime, mutiny 

 and revolution. But with increased knowledge and loss of 

 ignorance on the part of the masses of mankind, religions 

 and governments will lose their powers of control, which at 

 first mainly lie in the ignorance of those controlled. Hence, 

 as time advanced and governments became more powerful than 

 religions, revelation was sold to buy kings the power to govern 

 unruly nations, and the truths they taught were bartered in 

 exchange for the wealth laid by kings and princes at the 

 feet of divines, until religion after religion has got lost in 

 fables and parables which now conceal the ghosts of long- 

 forgotten or disused truths. It is the work of Science to 

 sift out the truth from the false teachings of religious beliefs 

 and of misgovernment, as man's mind slowly acquires the soul 

 of wisdom in the future and becomes able to form a clearer and 

 more enlightened view of good and evil, right and wrong. 



This is the duty of science, aided by further research of 

 history and evolution, as we become better able to under- 

 stand the true cause of our past creation and the correct 

 course along which we will have to proceed so as to do our 

 little mite to help to shape and guide the progress of future 

 evolution ; and if my treatise will help in this work, it will be 

 worth all the trouble, time and courage to face the disapproval 



