ction? For what does the choice of evil mean? It
means sorrow, it means pain, it means death, it means everything
horrible, everything undesirable, and means that a person deliberately
and intelligently pits himself against an infinite and almighty power
in what he knows must be an eternally losing battle. Can you conceive
of a sane person making such a choice as that?

If one of these first ancestors in the Garden of Eden, or no matter how
far back, had a right to choose for himself, I deny his right to choose
for me. What right had he to choose for you? What right had he to
determine that you should be born with a perverted and corrupt nature,
so that you would be certain to choose evil instead of good, helpless
in the hands of a fate like this?

Now you may look at this theory any way you please, place this
probationary choice at the beginning of human history on this planet,
or place it just as far back as you will, it is inconceivable, it is
unfair, it is unjust, it is insane, it is everything that is foolish
and wrong. And yet, note clearly one thing. So long as the world
believes this, so long as the one end and aim of human life, as held up
to people, is to be saved, think of the waste, think of the time, the
anxiety, the enthusiasms, the prayers, the consecrations; think of the
wealth, think of the intellectual faculties, think of the moral
devotion, this whole power of the world expended on a false issue,
turned into wrong channels!

Is this a dead question? Is there no reason for us to consider it here
in this latter part of the nineteenth century? Why, nine-tenths of
Christendom to-day is spending its time in trying to propitiate a God
who is not angry and trying to "save" souls that are not "lost."
Expending its energies along mistaken channels towards issues that are
entirely imaginary! Think, for example, if during the last two thousand
years all the time and the money, all the intelligence, all the
consecration, could have been spent on those things that would have
really helped men to find out the meaning of life, and to illustrate
that meaning in earnest living; suppose the money that has been spent
on the cathedrals, on the monasteries, spent in supporting hordes and
hordes of priests, spent in all the endeavor to save men in a future
life, if all this had been used in educating men and training them into
a comprehension of what kind of beings they really are, what kind of a
world this is in which