We are prone to separate ourselves from the rest of Nature and to claim for ourselves much that we deny to all other animals, such as the existence of the soul, and its immortality. But we are all of one stuff. Out of the earth has come a creature that has changed the surface of the earth over vast areas; that has changed the course of rivers, and the face of continents; that has harnessed the forces of the earth and turned them against themselves. How the earth elements came to organize themselves into this creature--here we can take no step! V. A PERSONAL GOD I once heard an Irish laborer refer solemnly, with an upward lift of the head, to the man up above. He did not refer to the man down below, but no doubt might have done so had occasion required. If we have one, we must have the other to keep the balance. The man up above must keep his skirts clean, and to admit of this the man down below must be the scapegoat. How long has the belief in the reality of these two manlike beings, the one all good, the other all evil, ruled in the minds and hearts of men! The old Hebrew prophets were drunk with the idea of a manlike Jehovah. A terrible man they made of him--a cruel, despotic ruler, wreaking his vengeance on his enemies, exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a lover of righteousness, but a vengeful, jealous, angry God. And the man down below was his fit counterpart, blocking and marring or defeating the plans of the man up above. These conceptions go with the infancy of the human reason. So many phases of our religious belief are the result of imperfect knowledge and false conceptions of the world in which we live! They come down to us from an earlier time, when the earth was regarded as the center of the universe, all other bodies revolving around it. Man lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven in an appeal to the heavenly powers. It seems as if the religious sense of the mass of mankind was, by the operation of some psychological law, forced to externize and visualize, yes, and humanize, the object upon which its interest centers. Orthodox religion, while proclaiming that God is a spirit, that He is everywhere, that He fills all nature, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without his notice, and that heaven is not a place, but a state of mind, yet makes its God a personal being, endowed with our human attributes, with likes and dislikes, sorely tried by our sins and weaknesses; nearer us sometimes than at others, present everywhere, yet abiding in one particular place called heaven--these and many other childish and contradictory things.