the production of every phenomenon which has contributed to
make both the physical and psychical parts of the universe what they
have been at any time, including the divine, diabolical and angelic
fictions which men have made and placed above and below the earth.

If you ask whether I am still a professing Christian, I will answer:
yes, yet the Brother Jesus of the New Testament, catholic creed and
protestant confessions, is not for me an historical personage, but only
a symbol of all that is for the good of the world, even as the Uncle Sam
of American literature is not an historical personage but only a symbol
of all which is for the good of the United States.

If you ask whether I am a praying Christian, I shall answer: yes, yet
when I pray, as I do every day, my prayer is an appeal to a real
divinity within my heart, the better self, of which self all the unreal
divinities in the skies including the Christian trinity, Father, Son and
Spirit, are but poetic symbols, and I no longer expect this God to
answer otherwise than the symbol of parents, Santa Claus, answers the
prayers of children, or the symbol of the United States, Uncle Sam,
answers the prayers of Americans.

If you ask whether I am a communing Christian, I shall answer: yes, yet
when I go to the Lord's Supper, as I do every month, the strength which
I receive is derived from the feeling that through it I place myself in
communion with my human brethren on earth, not with a divine brother in
the sky, particularly with the members of my church and the citizens of
my town and its neighborhood, but generally with all men, women and
children throughout the whole world, of which real brethren the brother
god in the sky, Jesus, is but a poetic symbol; nor do I now regard the
communion of this supper as being essentially different from that of any
ordinary family-meal, lodge-banquet, or socialist-picnic, with each of
which repasts the informal Lord's Supper of the apostolic church had
much more in common than it has with the formal celebrations of the
sacrament in any among the sectarian churches.[J]

Many critics represent that, in view of the changes in my theological
opinion, if I am an honest man, not a hypocrite, I will leave the
ministry and communion of the Episcopal Church. But why should I go
while any of my brother clergymen remain? I give a symbolic or
allegorical interpretation to every article of the whole system of
Christian supernaturalism and un