To answer this question has been the purpose of every system of religion known to mankind, and every sect, order and denomination known to every system. And here is where confusion begins. Some one evolves a formula, means, or method that he believes meets the case. Some others are persuaded to accept it and the sect grows. In the mean time some other person has evolved another; and some other still another, and so on, and on, and on, _ad infinitum_; all having the same purpose in view, and each claiming to be the _only right one_, or at least, the _best one_. And it is immaterial how erroneous, crude, or even barbarous one may look to the devotees of the other; in fundamental purpose they are all the same. The Hindu mother who casts her babe into the Ganges as food for the crocodiles, as a sacrifice to her gods, does it with as sublime a motive as any Christian mother ever bowed before the altar of her own church,--and for the same purpose: To get right with her God. The Parsee wife, who burns herself to ashes upon the funeral pyre of her dead husband, does it for the same purpose: To get right with her God. The devotee who throws his body before the wheels of the Juggernaut to have it crushed as an act of devotion, does it for the same purpose: To get right with his God. The devout Mohammedan who bows himself to the earth five times a day, and says his prayers with his face towards Mecca, does it for the same purpose: To get right with Allah. The savage who repeats his incantations to his fetish that he has probably made with his own hands, does it for the same purpose: To get right with God as he conceives him. The Chinese that burns his sticks before the image in his Joss-house, does it for the same purpose: To get right with his God. And so on _ad infinitum_, the same central purpose running thru it all, whether Hindu or Parsee, Buddist or Janist, Confucian or Shintoist, Jew or Gentile, Mohammedan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Baptist, Presbyterian or Lutheran, Calvinist or Arminian, Unitarian or Trinitarian, one and all, have one and the same ultimate object: To get into right relations with God, each according to his own conception of God, and what he understands to be his will concerning him. However, in the more rational interpretation of religion in these later times, the element of fear of punishment hereafter has been almost, if not entirely eliminated; and the religious objective is made the highest, noblest, purest, and best possible life in this world, for _its own intrinsic worth_, and without any reference to any future life, resting firmly in the faith that he who lives right cannot die wrong.