LEAF AND TENDRIL 



the brute world as instinct, cunning, ferocity, and 

 other animal traits; in the material world as law, 

 system, development, power. When we think of 

 God in any kind of human relation to the universe, 

 or as a being apart from it, as parent, judge, sover- 

 eign, guide, we at once stumble upon this problem 

 of evil, and invent schemes to justify God's ways 

 to man, to excuse or gloss over the cruelty, the suf- 

 fering, the injustice, we see in the world ; we invent 

 the devil, the garden of Eden, the myth of the fall 

 of man, sin, the atonement, the judgment day. 

 These things flow naturally from our anthropomor- 

 phic conception of God. They help reconcile the 

 irreconcilable; they bridge over the chasm. But 

 to the naturalistic conception, as distinguished from 

 the theological, these things are childish dreams, to 

 be put from us as we put away other childish things. 

 Sin has no more reality than the negative gravity 

 that Frank Stockton imagined, redemption no more 

 reality than the rebellion in heaven that Milton 

 invented, and heaven and hell no more existence 

 than any other fabled abode of the ancient worid. 

 To science, every day is a judgment day, eternity 

 is now and here, heaven lies all about us, all laws 

 are celestial laws. God is literally in everything 

 we see and hear and feel, in every flower that blows, 

 and not a sparrow falls to the ground without his 

 cognizance. Your days are appointed, and all the 

 hairs of your head are numbered, because nothing 

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