This immense symphony of life, adapted to every world according to conditions of space and time, develops like a universal choir, the parts of which are separated from each other by deserts of space and by eternities of time. It appears to us discontinuous because we can only hear one note at a time. But in reality there is no absolute separation either in space or time. Jupiter will not be inhabited by thinking beings for millions of years to come; from the point of view of the Absolute, the interval is not greater than that which separates yesterday from to-day. All this happens and accomplishes itself naturally, and as if God did not exist. And indeed the being whom the inhabitants of the Earth have hitherto defined as God does not exist. The Buddha of the Chinese, the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Jehovah of the Hebrews, the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the Teutates of the Gauls, the Jupiter of the Greeks, “God the Father” or “God the Son” of the Christians, or the great Allah of the Mussulman, are human conceptions, personifications invented by man in which he has embodied not only his highest aspirations and his sublimest virtues, but also his grossest prevarications and ugliest vices. Man has conceived as God in his own likeness. It is in the name of this pretended God that monarchs and pontiffs have in all the ages and under cover of all religions bound humanity in a slavery from which it has not yet freed itself. It is in the name of this God who “protects Germany,” “protects England,” “protects France,” “protects Italy,” “protects Russia,” “protects Turkey,” protects all the divisions and all the barbarities, that even in our own day the so-called civilised people of our planet have been armed in war against each other and, like mad dogs, have hurled themselves upon one another in a conflict over which falsehood and hypocrisy, seated on the steps of the thrones, figure a “God of Armies” as presiding, a God who blesses the daggers and plunges his hands in the smoking blood of victims to mark the foreheads of kings. It is to this God that altars are raised and Te Deums are chanted. It is in the names of the Gods of Olympus that the Greeks condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock; it is in the name of Jehovah that the high-priests and Pharisees crucified Jesus. It is in the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously condemned to the stake men like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet, John Huss, Savonarola, and so many other heroic victims; that the Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive in popular ceremonies; that Ravaillac stabbed Henry the Fourth. It was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory the Thirteenth that the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood and the free thinkers of the reformation were chased out of France; it is for the