is injurious to the intellect is also injurious to moral 
life; and on this conviction I base my conduct with 
respect to Christianity. That religion is pernicious to 
the intellect; it demands that the reason shall be sacri- 
ficed upon the altar; it orders civilised men to believe 
in the legends of a savage race. It places a hideous 
image, coyered with dirt and blood in the Holy of 
Holies; it rends the sacred veil of Truth in twain. It 
teaches that the Creator of the Universe, that sublime, 
that inscrutable power, exhibited his back to Moses, 
and ordered Hosea to commit adultery, and Ezekiel to 
eat dung. There is no need to say anything more. Such 
a religion is blasphemous and foul. Let those admire 
it who are able. I, for my part, feel it my duty to set 
free from its chains as many as J can. . . . There has 
heen enough of writing by implication and by innuendo; 
I do not believe in its utility, and I do not approve of 
its disguise. There should be no deceit in matters of 
religion. In my future assaults on Christianity I shall 
use the clearest language that I am able to command,” 
161. “We do not wish to extirpate religion from 
the life of man; we wish him to have a religion 
which will harmonise with his intellect, and which 
inquiry will strengthen, not destroy. We wish, in fact, 
to give him a religion, for now there are many who 
have none. We teach that there is a God, but not a 
God of the anthropoid variety . . . God is so great that 
. he does not deign to have personal relations with us 
human atoms. Those who desire to worship their Creator 
must worship him through mankind. . , . To develop to 
the utmost our genius and our love, that is the only 
true religion. Το do that which deserves to be written, 
to write that which deserves to be read, to tend the ' 
sick, to comfort the sorrowful, to animate the weary, to 
keep the temple of the body pure, to cherish the divinity 
within us, to be faithful to the intellect, to educate those 
powers which have been entrusted to our charge, and 
to employ them in the service of humanity, that is all 
that we can do. Then: our elements shall be dispersed 
and all is at an end. All is at an end for the unit, all 
is at an end for the atom, all is at an end for the speck 
of flesh and blood with the little spark of instinct which 
it calls its mind, but all is not at an end for the actual 
Man, the true Being, the glorious One. We teach that 
the soul is immortal; we teach that there is a future 
life; we teach that there is a Heaven in the ages far 
away; but not for us single corpuscles, not for us dots 
of animated jelly, but for the One of whom we are the 
elements, and who, though we perish, never dies, but 
grows from period to period, and by the united efforts 
of single molecules called men, or of those cell-groups 
called nations is raised towards the divine power which 
he will finally attain, . . . A day will come when the 
European God of the nineteenth century will be classed 
with the gods of Olympus and the Nile , . . when nurses 
will relate to children the legends of the Christian mytho- 
logy as they now tell them fairy tales. A day will come 
when the current belief in property after death (for is 
not existence property, and the dearest property of all?) 
will be accounted a strange and selfish idea... . 
^ 
61 
/ 
Chapter. IV—Elimination of the Supernatural 
162. “You blessed ones who shall inherit that future 
age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant 
beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn 
back your eyes on us poor savages . ... remember that it is 
to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and gran- 
deur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and 
star-towers and dissecting-rooms and workshops are pre- 
paring the materials of the human growth. And as for 
"ourselves (all we have) we owe to the labors of other 
men. Let us, therefore, remember them with gratitude; 
let us follow their glorious example by adding some- 
thing new to the knowledge of mankind; let us pay to 
the future the debt which we owe to the past. All men, 
indeed, cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists; 
but all men can join in that gigantic and god-like work, 
the progress of creation. . . . He who strives to subdue 
his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed 
life—and who cultivates the social affections . . . what- 
ever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain. 
But if he act thus not from mere prudence, not in the 
vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from 
a pure sense of duty, as a citizen of Nature, as a patriot 
of the planet on which he dwells, then our philosophy 
which once appeared to him so cold and cheerless will 
become a religion of the heart, and will elevate him to 
the skies. . .. ' 
163. "I give to universal history a strange but true 
title—ihe Martyrdom of Man. n each generation the 
human race has been tortured that their children might 
profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded 
on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that 
we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are 
to come? Famine, pestilence, and war are no longer 
essential for the advancement of the human race, But 
a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this. 
we must pass in order that our posterity may rise. The 
Soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must 
die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken 
from the human race, as youth and beauty vanish never 
to return." 
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY (1824-1895). 
164. I conclude these extracts by quoting the last 
three paragraphs of Huxley’s brief Autobiography, which 
was prefaced to an edition of his Lectures and Essays, 
and which well expresses the attitude of Biosophy to- 
wards Supernatural Religion, 
165. “The last thing that it would be proper for 
me to do would be to speak of the work of my life, or 
to say at the end of the day whether I think I have 
earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial 
judges of themselves. Young men may be; I doubt if 
old men are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as they 
look back, and the mountain they set themselves to climb 
in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably 
higher ranges, when, with failing breath, they reach the 
top. But if I may speak of the objects 1 have had more 
or less definitely in view since I began the ascent of 
my hillock, they are briefly these: To promote the in- 
crease of natural knowledge and to forward the applica- 
