Outside of the fact that your continuous mendicancy has accomplished nothing for you, you have an abundance of negative evidence to hint that your incessant supplication, instead of bringing to you favors from the Deity, has shadowed upon you in an unmistakable manner the signs of his displeasure. For as he has raised you gradually out of the lower forms, and enlarged your capacities, until in the last he has taken you into his confidence so far as to teach you the methods of his work, and to deliver up to you the hitherto pent-up forces for your convenience and use, yet in the progress of these concessions it is to be noted as a significant fact, that your prayers have served rather to obstruct than to promote them. Indeed, as there is nothing so conclusively the evidence of divine presence and help as material and intellectual progress, it will be difficult to show, in the record of terrestrial things, that the supremacy of prayer has not invariably been followed by a temporary withdrawal of this divine assistance and support.
CHAPTER VI.
Our veneration for the Deity, which is truer and more sincere than yours, arises from a widely different conception. Looking back upon the ages, and what they have brought to us, we perceive that each new development in matter brings an increase of those qualities which give us pleasure to behold. Beginning with the most unattractive shapes, this process of change in organization and symmetry, by an unalterable law of the Creator, bring to us out of the ugliness of the past the beautiful of the present. Since, therefore, we see Him constantly at work, transforming the ugly into the beautiful, we believe He is pleased with the colors, shapes, and qualities of things which delight our own cultivated senses. Acting then on this conviction, we surround ourselves with the beautiful in nature and art.
The change, in the form of matter, is not more instructive than the steady modification of intelligence, which, from its primitive ignorance, superstition, and brutality, has gradually been raised step by step to its present higher grade of thought and action. We recognize here a fact most important and significant to us. While the divine energy is steadily at work, converting lower forms of matter into higher ones, we are given no part in the proceeding. It goes on without our assistance, and we have no power to diminish or accelerate its steady onward course. It is widely different with intelligence. That is given into our hands, with all its grand possibilities. In that, we have evidence of the divine confidence to promote its advancement in view of the blessings it holds in store. Taking this view, we have for centuries cultivated the mind in all directions of knowledge and feeling, as the chief part of our religion. The motion of the spheres is not more certainly the work of this great being, than are these progressive changes in mind and matter.
We believe vice and ugliness to be convertible terms, the latter a quality due to imperfectly developed matter, and the first a property of intelligence in the same imperfect state; just as beauty and virtue describe together, or separately, the same advanced evolution.
But while working in harmony with the Deity, and assisting in his purposes, we have constantly in view, as an incentive to action, the consummation or goal to which all these changes tend. We believe the outcome to be a spiritual life with all things knowable, and a state of perfection and happiness beyond our present conception. Happiness, then, being a religious aspiration, we promote it in all ways to the innocent and reasonable inclinations of our present state.
Our religion is consequently more jubilant than solemn. We have no torments in store in it, nor long drawn agonies and mortifications of the flesh. Its only business with death is to smooth its pillow, and to reduce its attendant sorrows to the minimum. To the misfortunes of the present our religion extends its hand of sympathy and material help. To what purpose should it introduce and dwell upon the miseries and sorrows of the past? We let the dead ages rest. We can find nothing in their ashes to compare with the living. The present is better than the past, as the future will be better in exact measure with the new truths discovered, and the old fallacies cast aside. You rake among the emanations of an early and imperfect development for monitors and guides, and do honor to them for the mysteries they invoke. You place the withered hand of the mummy into the warm palm of the living, and your ceremony of introduction is a prayer that the living body may never depart from the dead form.
The untenable and unsupportable premises upon which your religions are based will lead to their decay. Nothing of them will remain to you but their spirituality. Shorn of their superstitions, and guided by the intellect, the spiritual part of them will be retained by you as a jewel repolished and in a new setting.