oul?"

"What must I do to be saved?" This has, in one form or another, at one
time or another, been the burden of almost every soul among men. How
can man attain unto right relations with his God? This is the great
question of the ages. _Keep in mind_ that it is immaterial who or what
this god may be, how crude or how refined, from the lowest fetish to
the highest spiritual conception, the fundamental question remains ever
the same: How shall man get right with his God? What must man do to be
saved?

To answer this question has been the purpose of every system of
religion known to mankind, and every sect, order and denomination known
to every system. And here is where confusion begins. Some one evolves
a formula, means, or method that he believes meets the case. Some
others are persuaded to accept it and the sect grows. In the mean time
some other person has evolved another; and some other still another,
and so on, and on, and on, _ad infinitum_; all having the same purpose
in view, and each claiming to be the _only right one_, or at least, the
_best one_. And it is immaterial how erroneous, crude, or even
barbarous one may look to the devotees of the other; in fundamental
purpose they are all the same. The Hindu mother who casts her babe
into the Ganges as food for the crocodiles, as a sacrifice to her gods,
does it with as sublime a motive as any Christian mother ever bowed
before the altar of her own church,--and for the same purpose: To get
right with her God. The Parsee wife, who burns herself to ashes upon
the funeral pyre of her dead husband, does it for the same purpose: To
get right with her God. The devotee who throws his body before the
wheels of the Juggernaut to have it crushed as an act of devotion, does
it for the same purpose: To get right with his God. The devout
Mohammedan who bows himself to the earth five times a day, and says his
prayers with his face towards Mecca, does it for the same purpose: To
get right with Allah. The savage who repeats his incantations to his
fetish that he has probably made with his own hands, does it for the
same purpose: To get right with God as he conceives him. The Chinese
that burns his sticks before the image in his Joss-house, does it for
the same purpose: To get right with his God. And so on _ad infinitum_,
the same central purpose running thru it all, whether Hindu or Parsee,
Buddist or Janist, Confucian or Shintoist, Jew or Gentile, Mohammedan
or