of a battle.

--_Alfred Russel Wallace, in "The Malay Archipelago"_

ALFRED R. WALLACE

The question of how this world and all the things in it were made,
has, so far as we know, always been asked. And volunteers have at no
time been slow about coming forward and answering. For this service the
volunteer has usually asked for honors and also exemption from toil more
or less unpleasant.

He has also demanded the joy of riding in a coach, being carried in a
palanquin, and sitting on a throne clothed in purple vestments, trimmed
with gold lace or costly furs. Very often the volunteer has also
insisted on living in a house larger than he needed, having more food
than his system required, and drinking decoctions that are costly, spicy
and peculiar.

All of which luxury has been paid for by the people, who are told that
which they wish to hear.

The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the
turf.

Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was
adapted to their understanding.

Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then
followed explanations of what God did each day.

Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew
discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to
know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's
explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the
consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within
was the guiding impulse of their lives.

In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and
dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations
against them.

Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express
themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire
penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege,
heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these
invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or
exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to
invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support
and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was
made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based
upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.

Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander,