, fearsome "schemes of salvation,"
whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between
them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that
God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually
creating God in his own image.

His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our
deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that
it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion.
They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with
preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full
of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed--unless
he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom
fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in
ol' clo'.

* * * * *

In the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate
to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the
Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle
"indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at
the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred
housecleaning, a divine fumigation.

Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and
not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic
Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty
God."

Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every
civilized country being represented.

A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the
spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that
the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.

On this occasion, Haeckel said:

"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and
upward march of Freedom.

"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but
purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed,
that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and
undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last
Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the
Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no
longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates
to itself the name