eparate item of
this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving
heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against
which, like seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate
personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something
to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome that will leave
more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real
now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the
sun burns.... Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side
with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable
belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to
be found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought from the
immense forces of the universe."

In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand times No! there
is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which
will meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the
human whirlpool." And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How
terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew the history
of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of
human endeavor HAD been found absolutely correct and universally
applicable--so that every human being would be compelled to pass
through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under
its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or
system; and yet there is something--as Jefferies prophetically felt and
with a great longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root
of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the
CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us:
it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity.

The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last
chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic
or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and
abstract--are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt
those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will
catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the
mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and
having no real substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they