attempt at solving this riddle to say that the Church of Rome is the special object of this denunciatory picture, for it is matter of history that Papal Rome never dominated over all nations, peoples, and tribes, as this harlot idol is said to have done and will continue doing. The woman, scarlet or blood-clothed, is the brain or mind of self-worshipping or self-serving man and woman, and the beast is the body of this voluntary centre of the animal; altogether constituting the Satan, or antagonist of the divine will, so graphically portrayed by Baron Bunsen, in his "Signs of the Times," just quoted.

This ten-membered, blood-sustained creature, man, was in times bygone an idolater of his body; but now, much too well educated for such gross prostrations before sacerdotal systems, he is latterly a worshipper of his intellect as immortal, and evidences, in the social disorganization of civilization, the chaos that his darling moralism of free will so powerfully contributes to keep seething and bubbling up in lurid fires of war and insurrections. Man, that aforetime hoisted his heroes, wine-swilling, licentious, bloodthirsty warriors, into heaven and immortality-once a sacrificer of his own and his children's blood to propitiate the vengeance of his postulated powers of evil-in all past time a perverse, petulant, and peevish worshipper of his own darling will, appears, even in these last days, as bad an idolater as ever; singing his loudest pæans, and waving gaudiest and brightest starspangled banners in the van of that marvellous march of intellect and civilization, assumedly so superior to aught antecedent to the perished records submerged in those waters of oblivion that constituted the flood, as if no awful lesson of stereotyped mental life could be read in Chinese life, a history lost in antiquity, part of that civilization that was hoary with age when the first messengers, or angels of God, appeared upon the world's great stage, and after a brief but tragic play fell to rise no more. Mankind were worshipping in those days, as they do even now, commercial and social prosperity, the sciences, the arts, and the luxurious refinements of life. They speculated hopefully of the future, for

SELF-WILL THE ANTAGONIST OF DEITY.

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that ultimate civilization that they, one day not very distant, hoped to reach, when suddenly they are petrified, and vegetate dust-begotten creatures to turn at length to dust again. Merrily laughing, they continue cooking their savoury morsels, washing them down with draughts of the rarest wines, just as the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah did, till they stumbled all together into the brimstone pit of eternal death, fancying themselves all the while immortals and gods, and therein vastly superior to the perishing orang outangs.

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CHAPTER II.

CONFLICT OF RIVAL OPINIONS.

SACERDOTALISM and science, or the philosophy of cosmism, have ever been, are now, and will continue to be, radically and irreconcilably opposed to the end of human time.

For the first is the philosophy of the absolute, and the second is that progressing study of the relative which necessarily denies the assumed knowledge of the absolute; and thus it is that the two studies can no more be reconciled, than oil and water can be intermixed.

Sacerdotalism postulates the existence of absolute beings, who contend in an interminable war of good and evil principles; whereas cosmism, which is the philosophy of naturalism, defers the solution of this occult problem of pain and sorrow, called evil, in the universe, to the day of judgment.

Sacerdotalism is the effete philosophy of the super or contra-natural; whereas science is the philosophy of natural phenomena.

The former, which is the teaching of priestcraft, assumes that the material universe has been created by fiat out of nothing. In flat contradiction of this dogma, cosmism maintains that the universal existence is eternal, and neither was, nor could possibly have been, created or fabricated by simple fiat out of nothing.

Sacerdotalism contends, that this postulated creation of the material universe by fiat out of nothing, means creation by construction or fabrication, as though it was the work of

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an artificer, who designed everything, but had actually no materials to work with.

The science of cosmism, on the other hand, maintains that creation means generation, and that the hypotheses of construction, and fabrication by a designer, are haphazard conjectures that are calculated to mislead.

Science asserts, that creation is only another term for production by generation, in other words, that creation is the union of two eternal self-existent entities, generating a third, and intermediate one, which is nature, self-existent in relation,—and in opposition to that logical deduction from theological assumptions, that the processes of nature are mere mechanical operations, science maintains that all natural phenomena are one sustained process of gestation.

Sacerdotalism pretends to have attained, and makes a great parade of, an absolute knowledge of the great primary paternal element of and in the universe; whereas science contends that this spiritual Father is hidden behind the impenetrable veil of material and maternal processes, or natural gestation.

In opposition to sacerdotal theology, which assumes the knowledge of the absolute, science maintains and demonstrates that all known natural processes are phenomenal, and relative, and exist as conditioned, that is, that they exist as the condition of some unknown cause, and therefore as all natural phenomena must be relative to something in which they exist that preceded these modes of conditional or phenomenal being, they cannot be absolute per se, but are revelations of the mutual relationship subsisting between two primary entities, which exist uncaused, uncreated, and unbegotten, and consequently unconditioned, unlimited, and infinite, both in respect of time and space.

The word that personifies the conception of self-existence is the present participle, Being, of the verb To Be, and the first personality of this great ever-present word is indicated by the duality of two conjoined in one emphatic revelation, "I AM." These two words, so linked, represent the likeness of the Universal Being which generates in the mind the

conviction of self-existence, per se, that shuts out all possibility of any preceding existence. In this comprehensive and exhaustive enunciation of vitality in the being of "I AM," we find unity, but since all cognised existence consists of both unity and multiplicity, then, unless the infinity of unity is tacitly allowed to be limited by multiplicity in every direction, we are forced to consider the problem as to how plurality can exist without limiting and destroying unity; and further, how unity, per se, can generate that conception of multiplicity in unity which we retain in the mind as inherent in the constitution of universal existence.

Sacerdotal systems of ancient days have assumed, apparently gratuitously, that one solitary, self-existent "I AM," created a second, "thou art," out of nothing; and then these two proceeded to create a third, and finally, that this triad combined together, or conjugated the construction or fabrication of plurality: at all events, they segregated themselves into indefinite multiplicity. Both singularly and plurally, personification has always stopped short at a third, and after this third, definition spreads out without specialization. The grand mistake, however, consists in supposing that one entity could conjugate with another, when there was no such second in existence. That two entities should by their conjugation, or conjugal union, generate a third is quite conceivable, but it is not conceivable that the first person singular of the ever-present tense of Being, or To Be, indicated by "I am," should produce the second person, "thou art" either out of itself alone or from nothing; for the first hypothesis does not indicate any second personality at all, because it amounts after all to nothing but a flux, or continuation of the first entity "I am," and leaving no material difference to denote any conception supposed to be begotten by the words "thou art." Again, the first could not have created the second out of nothing, as something different from itself, becanse entities possessing nothing in common with each other cannot beget any conception of mutual relationship, nor can they cause or affect one another.

To say that the first person singular of the verb To Be,