hardly be possible to exaggerate man's
wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
There is a _fond_ of unhappiness in every bosom, but the depths are
seldom probed; and there is no doubt that sometimes frivolity and
sometimes sturdy habit helps to keep attention on the surface and to
cover up the inner void. Certain moralists, without meaning to be
satirical, often say that the sovereign cure for unhappiness is work.
Unhappily, the work they recommend is better fitted to dull pain than to
remove its cause. It occupies the faculties without rationalising the
life. Before mankind could inspire even moderate satisfaction, not to
speak of worship, its whole economy would have to be reformed, its
reproduction regulated, its thoughts cleared up, its affections
equalised and refined.

To worship mankind as it is would be to deprive it of what alone makes
it akin to the divine--its aspiration. For this human dust lives; this
misery and crime are dark in contrast to an imagined excellence; they
are lighted up by a prospect of good. Man is not adorable, but he
adores, and the object of his adoration may be discovered within him and
elicited from his own soul. In this sense the religion of humanity is
the only religion, all others being sparks and abstracts of the same.
The indwelling ideal lends all the gods their divinity. No power, either
physical or psychical, has the least moral prerogative nor any just
place in religion at all unless it supports and advances the ideal
native to the worshipper's soul. Without moral society between the
votary and his god religion is pure idolatry; and even idolatry would be
impossible but for the suspicion that somehow the brute force exorcised
in prayer might help or mar some human undertaking.

[Sidenote: Cosmic piety.]

There is, finally, a philosophic piety which has the universe for its
object. This feeling, common to ancient and modern Stoics, has an
obvious justification in man's dependence upon the natural world and in
its service to many sides of the mind. Such justification of cosmic
piety is rather obscured than supported by the euphemisms and
ambiguities in which these philosophers usually indulge in their attempt
to preserve the customary religious unction. For the more they personify
the universe and give it the name of God the more they turn it into a
devil. The universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and
immense engine; its extent, its