To-day, now, at this very moment, all over the civilised world, this terrible game of “playing the fool” is going on with reckless speed and continuity. I use the word “terrible” advisedly, for nothing more pregnant with all the elements of positive terror was ever seen than the present-time spectacle of Human Humbug set face to face with that Eternal Equity which has existed always, and which ever will exist without any change in its Divine Source, Cause and Intention. Man, endowed with splendid gifts of reason, imagination and psychic power, is everywhere gambling away his highest birthright for gold; Man, whom the celestial forces have led step by step through carefully measured gradations of intellectual evolution till he has arrived at the open gateways of Science, there to behold the infinitely marvellous benefits he may possess and enjoy, still insults the Giver of all his good by his fumbling forms of faith and worship suited only to barbaric minds in a state of embryo--Man, semi-apathetic and in many cases wholly indifferent to the higher roads of progress and to the steady unfolding of that endless perspective of order and beauty intended for the individual happiness of every individual soul, still makes wilful havoc of his own carefully organised civilisations, like a child who builds a house of cards and blows it down with a breath--and this because his civilisations are mostly of a flimsy structure, having no foundation on any fundamental Law which Nature can or will tolerate for more than a very brief time. All history teaches this with stern and pitiless repetition; and the signs and portents which gave warning of the downfall of the Roman Empire were of precisely the same character as the signs and portents which warn us of similar downfalls impending for great nations to-day. The scheme of Creation is plainly meant to be a perpetual movement towards perpetual advancement--this truth is clearly demonstrated in all natural evolution, and Man is perforce compelled, despite himself, to move with the onward and upward process--but he invariably “hangs back” and tries to put a stop on the wheel, with the result that he is himself crushed and ground to powder in the wheel’s relentless revolving. He makes religions, laws and morals for himself which have no prototype in the order of Nature, and he thereby stands rebelliously opposed to the Supreme Intelligence, whose design of life being exact mathematics, swerves not by so much as the shadow of a hair.