riests.

My heart bleeds when I contemplate the sufferings endured by the
millions now dead; of those who lived when the world appeared to be
insane; when the heavens were filled with an infinite HORROR, who
snatched babes, with dimpled hands and rosy cheeks, from the white
breasts of mothers and dashed them into an abyss of eternal flame.

Slowly, beautifully, like the coming of the dawn, came the grand truth
that the universe is governed by law--that disease fastens itself upon
the good and upon the bad; that the tornado cannot be stopped by
counting beads; that the rushing lava pauses not for bended knees, the
lightning for clasped and uplifted hands, nor the cruel waves of the
sea for prayer; that paying tithes causes rather than prevents famine;
that pleasure is not sin; that happiness is the only good; that demons
and gods exist only in the imagination; that faith is a lullaby, sung
to put the soul to sleep; that devotion is a bribe that fear offers to
supposed power; that offering rewards in another world for obedience in
this, is simply buying a soul on credit; that knowledge consists in
ascertaining the laws of nature, and that wisdom is the science of
happiness. Slowly, grandly, beautifully, these truths are dawning upon
mankind.

From Copernicus we learned that this earth is only a grain of sand on
the infinite shore of the universe; that everywhere we are surrounded
by shining worlds vastly greater than our own, all moving and existing
in accordance with law. True, the earth began to grow small, but man
began to grow great.

The moment the fact was established that other worlds are governed by
law, it was only natural to conclude that our little world was also
under its dominion. The old theological method of accounting for
physical phenomena by the pleasure and displeasure of the Deity was, by
the intellectual, abandoned. They found: that disease, death, life,
thought, heat, cold, the seasons, the winds, the dreams of man, the
instinct of animals--in short, that all physical and mental phenomena
are governed by law, absolute, eternal and inexorable.

Let it be understood by the term Law is meant the same invariable
relations of succession and resemblance predicated of all facts
springing from like conditions. Law is a fact--not a cause. It is a
fact that like conditions produce like results; this fact is LAW. When
we say that the universe is governed by law, we mean that this fact,
called law,