sneers. Though the free--thinker is no longer chained to a stake and
burned, people still tell lies about him, and do their best to starve
him by hurting his reputation. The virtues of forbearance and
self-control are still in a very rudimentary state, and of mutual
helpfulness there is far too little among men.

Nevertheless in all these respects some improvement has been made, along
with the diminution of warfare, and by the time warfare has not merely
ceased from the earth but has come to be the dimly remembered phantom of
a remote past, the development of the sympathetic side of human nature
will doubtless become prodigious. The manifestation of selfish and
hateful feelings will be more and more sternly repressed by public
opinion, and such feelings will become weakened by disuse, while the
sympathetic feelings will increase in strength as the sphere for their
exercise is enlarged. And thus at length we see what human progress
means. It means throwing off the brute-inheritance,--gradually throwing
it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle
needless. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state in which
he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in
which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the
brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will
become extinct. Theology has had much to say about original sin. This
original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which
every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance
toward true salvation. Fresh value is thus added to human life. The
modern prophet, employing the methods of science, may again proclaim
that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Work ye, therefore, early and
late, to prepare its coming.

XV.

The Message of Christianity.

Now what is this message of the modern prophet but pure
Christianity?--not the mass of theological doctrine ingeniously piled up
by Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement and Athanasius and
Augustine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught
with good tidings to men, from the very lips of Jesus and Paul! When did
St. Paul's conception of the two men within him that warred against each
other, the appetites of our brute nature and the God-given yearning for
a higher life,--when did this grand conception ever have so much
significance as now? When have we ever before held