d preachers on earth.

You will note that I am not contending for the liberty to live without
reference to an external authority. If this were my contention you would
rightly insist (as some among my friends do) that I am an atheist in
religion and an anarchist in politics; but I am neither, for I recognize
the fact that I must live with reference to the existence of an external
authority, matter-force law, and there is no other, upon which anything
good in religion or politics is dependent.

No one is an atheist in religion, an anarchist in politics or anything
bad, who, in the physical realm of life, tries to live with reference to
the law of nature, and who, in the moral realm of life, tries to live
with reference to a truth which is that law humanely interpreted by
himself in accordance with his own experience, observation,
investigation and reason. In the nature of things, the interpretation
cannot be by some one else, because one man cannot live the moral life
on another's ideals any more than he can live the physical life on
another's meals.

Since this is the case, it follows that the whole conception of a law
which is willed by a god and revealed or formulated by his
representatives (prophets, kings, priests, legislators) to which a man
must have reference, if he would live the moral life, is, at best, a
harmless fiction and at worst a hurtful superstition.

There is no one (man or god) with whom people can stand in the moral
realm except themselves alone, and if they are not within this realm
they are not men and women.

Manhood is dependent upon standing alone with matter-force nature and
with human reason, and it is manhood which really counts everywhere in
the social realm, for without manhood one is nothing anywhere in that
realm.

Nature is my God. The gods of the several supernaturalistic
interpretations of religion (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) are so many
symbols of this divinity. The words of this God are the facts of nature.
My religion and politics, worship and patriotism consist in a desire and
effort to discover these facts and to interpret and live them humanely.

My God, Nature, is a triune divinity--matter being the Father, force the
Son, and law the Spirit.

Nature is the sum of the matter-force-law phenomena of which the
universe is constituted. Man with his barbarism and civilization is but
one among such phenomena, on a level with the rest, as to his beginning
and ending, and as