me immemorial, man does not discover
his gods, _but invents them_. He invents them in the light of his
experience and endows them with capacities that indicate the stage of
man's mental development.

Religion is not the product of civilized man. Man inherits his god just
as he inherits his physical qualities. The idea of a supernatural being
creating and governing this earth is a phantom born in the mind of the
savage. If it had not been born in the early stages of man's mental
development, it surely would not come into existence now. History proves
that as the mind of man expands, it does not discover new gods, but that
it discards them. It is not strange, therefore, that there has not been
advanced a new major religious belief in the last 1300 years. All modern
religious conceptions, no matter how disguised, find their origin in the
fear-stricken ignorance of the primitive savage.

A Christian will admit that the gods of others are man-made, and that
their creed is similar to the worship of the savage. He looks at their
gods with the vision of a civilized being; but when he looks at his own
god, he forgets his civilization, he relapses centuries of time, and
_his_ mental viewpoint is that of the savage.

Christianity, with its primitive concepts, can make its adherents firm
in the belief of great monstrosities. When its adherents believed that
the Bible sanctioned the destruction of heretics and witches, they were
certainly doing things from a Christian standpoint. It was this
standpoint that justified an embittered denunciation of evolution at one
time and then recanting, adopted it as a part of the Bible teaching.
When the Spaniards blotted out an entire civilization in South America,
when Catholics butchered Protestants, or Protestants butchered
Catholics, they were all justified from the Christian standpoint.

Man has been living on this planet some 500,000 years. Jesus appeared
less than 2000 years ago to save mankind. What of those countless
millions of men that died before Christ came to save the world from
damnation? If the Christian creed, that except a man believes in the
Lord Jesus Christ he cannot be saved, is maintained, then it must be
that those millions of human beings who lived before Christ and had no
chance to believe, are in hell-fire.

It is probable that one of the factors that turned primitive man's
attention away from his cruel and short, earthly existence to the
thought of a more lengthy