With a Devil at our disposal to whom we can impute the evils of life, the situation clears up, and God emerges, shorn of his omnipotence, it is true, but still the symbol of goodness and love. In our day the Devil has lost his prestige and is much discredited. As a power in men’s minds his reign is over, and hell, his headquarters, no longer casts its lurid light upon human life. In an equal measure the old Hebraic conception of God as a much-magnified man, the king and ruler of heaven and earth, with heaven as his throne, has gone out. God is now little more than a name for that tendency or power in the universe which makes for righteousness, and which has brought evolution thus far on its course. To account for the world as we find it, we are compelled to look upon it as the inevitable result of the clashing and interaction of purely natural forces resulting in both so-called good and evil; that is, in what is favorable to life, and in what is against life. But as life is adaptive and assimilative, it slowly turns the evil into good, of course at the expense of delays and waste and suffering, and thus development becomes possible, and man, after untold millions of years, appears. When we look forth upon the universe, what do we see? When we look upon the non-living world, we see a mere welter and chaos of material forces--a conflict of chemical and physical principles seeking a stable equilibrium--water running, winds blowing, mountains decaying, stars and systems whirling, suns waning or waxing, nebulæ condensing, vast orbs colliding, and all issuing in a certain order and system under the rule of purely mechanical and mathematical laws. The stellar universe is a vast machine, amenable to the measurements and calculations of the astronomers. The eclipses all occur exactly on time, and the planets revolve in their orbits without the untruth, as Whitman says, of a single second. The disorder and disruptions which occur are inside of vast fundamental laws. Our mountains and seas are shaken by earthquakes, and the earth’s surface is swept by cyclones and the seashores are devastated by tidal waves, yet these things are only phases of the effort toward a fixed equilibrium. The earth’s surface as we now behold it, the distribution of land and water, of mountain and plain, the procession of the seasons, our whole weather system, the friendly and the unfriendly forces, are all the outcome of this clash and stress of the physical forces, which make a paradise of some places and the opposite of others.