When we turn to the higher forms of organic life, especially to man and his history, what do we see? We still behold the same trial-and-error method, the same cruelty, waste, delays, and suffering that we behold in the lower forms. We see progress, we see the growth of ethical principles, we see man’s increasing mastery over the forces of nature and over himself, but in the competition of races and nations, the race is still to the swift and the battle to the strong. We see a high standard of individual morality contending with a low standard of international morality. We still see civilized nations looking upon treaties as “scraps of paper”; we see them regarding their neighbors as rivals and enemies; we see millions of men that have not the shadow of a grievance against one another, fiercely trying to slay one another, and praying to the same God for victory. We see the nefarious doctrine that physical might makes moral right written in lines of blood and fire across the face of whole kingdoms; we see the legitimate competitions of peace and industry turned into the strife of armed conquest; we see a small and peaceful nation trampled underfoot by a big nation bent upon plunder and conquest; we see hatred toward a kindred nation glorified, and the murder of innocent women and children and other non-combatants adopted as a fixed policy; in fact, we see all the vast resources of science and of modern civilization wedded to the spirit of the Hun, and turned loose in a war for world-dominion. The results of eighteen centuries of Christian culture come off the German nation like a whitewash in this craze and fury of the military spirit; the German people stand revealed as at heart unmitigated barbarians, wonderfully efficient, but wonderfully inhuman. If we appeal to the supernatural to account for things, we certainly need a Devil, if not several of them, to account for the temper of the German mind during the late war. No wonder the good people are losing faith, and are shocked and dismayed at the thought that their all-loving, omnipotent God permits these things. Down the whole course of history we see no other powers at work than those that are about us. Good is in the ascendancy everywhere, or soon will be; evil dies out; the wicked cease from troubling; the amelioration of mankind goes on; and no God or Devil hinders or favors. Nature is both God and Devil, and natural law is supreme in the world. The moral consciousness of man,--all our dreams of perfection, of immortality, of the good, the beautiful, the true, all our veneration and our religious aspirations,--this is Nature, too. Man is a part of the universe; all that we call good in him, and all that we call bad, are a part of the universe. The God he worships is his own shadow cast upon the heavens, and the Devil he fears is his own shadow likewise. The divine is the human, magnified and exalted; the Satanic is the human, magnified and debased.