You will note that I am not contending for the liberty to live without reference to an external authority. If this were my contention you would rightly insist (as some among my friends do) that I am an atheist in religion and an anarchist in politics; but I am neither, for I recognize the fact that I must live with reference to the existence of an external authority, matter-force law, and there is no other, upon which anything good in religion or politics is dependent. No one is an atheist in religion, an anarchist in politics or anything bad, who, in the physical realm of life, tries to live with reference to the law of nature, and who, in the moral realm of life, tries to live with reference to a truth which is that law humanely interpreted by himself in accordance with his own experience, observation, investigation and reason. In the nature of things, the interpretation cannot be by some one else, because one man cannot live the moral life on another's ideals any more than he can live the physical life on another's meals. Since this is the case, it follows that the whole conception of a law which is willed by a god and revealed or formulated by his representatives (prophets, kings, priests, legislators) to which a man must have reference, if he would live the moral life, is, at best, a harmless fiction and at worst a hurtful superstition. There is no one (man or god) with whom people can stand in the moral realm except themselves alone, and if they are not within this realm they are not men and women. Manhood is dependent upon standing alone with matter-force nature and with human reason, and it is manhood which really counts everywhere in the social realm, for without manhood one is nothing anywhere in that realm. Nature is my God. The gods of the several supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) are so many symbols of this divinity. The words of this God are the facts of nature. My religion and politics, worship and patriotism consist in a desire and effort to discover these facts and to interpret and live them humanely. My God, Nature, is a triune divinity--matter being the Father, force the Son, and law the Spirit. Nature is the sum of the matter-force-law phenomena of which the universe is constituted. Man with his barbarism and civilization is but one among such phenomena, on a level with the rest, as to his beginning and ending, and as to the dependence of his life and its fullness upon conformity to the matter-force law, without necessary or, indeed, possible reference to any divine-human system of laws as set forth by a catholic or protestant church or by an imperialistic or democratic state.