e the one element of truth in all the
"little systems" of this and of all time. It is here they touch the
confines of the eternal. It is in this centre of changeless truth that
all their wandering, broken lights do meet. This is the one reality
behind the phantoms and phenomena wherewith they have been perplexing
and confusing man's thoughts; it is at the same time the great ideal,
the passion for which is the star of life.

What a majestic source of unity is there here! The soul positively
thrills at the thought of the boundless possibilities of good which
centre in this conception of religion. That which the faiths of the
world aspired to do, might hope to become an accomplished fact did
their votaries believe with Shelley that only

The One remains, the many change and pass;

did they obey the ancient prophet's command, "Depart from your idols".
For what are all the current creeds and orthodoxies of every age and
land but so many "idols of the market place," veritable _simulacra_ or
images of something ineffable, beyond the power of man's mind to
completely conceive, or of his stammering tongue to utter? They served
their purpose in the childhood of humanity, they were schoolmasters to
train it to higher things, tabernacles of skins wherein to enshrine the
Holy of Holies in rude and uncultured times. But now that humanity is
reaching the full stature of its manhood, is it not time to preach from
the house-tops what philosophers have been thinking ever since the
emancipation of European intellect, aye and before it too, in the great
Moorish schools, which sprung up before the scholasticism of the middle
ages? Is it not time that intelligent clergymen of every school in
Christendom should openly declare in their pulpits what they think,
believe and discuss in the privacies of their studies?

If truth is the one thing which never yet did men any harm, tell them
that the universe is not built upon the narrow plan they had been
taught of old; that its age is immeasurable; that man has been an
inhabitant of this fragment of it for a hundred thousand years at
least; that there never was any such being as a first man, some seven
thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced
upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself
and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy
of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and
sacrifice a