Hence arises, and always will arise, trouble. Trouble and unrest! The sum of things never comes right, add it up, subtract, or multiply as we will. We persist in our childish efforts to fit in figures which have no place or part in the Divine quantities. Now and then in some sudden flash of higher consciousness, we see the folly of our actions--but seeing, we pretend to be blind. Some of us devote ourselves to a study of the sciences, and we peep through a hundred loop-holes into a vista of shining truths, any one of which would help us to draw closer to God--yet presently we turn away and talk of predestination and original sin, and feign to believe in a Deity whose rage against His own Creation is so insensate and barbaric as only to be pacified by Blood! Blood--blood! The cry of the vengeful, the murderous, the cruel, the tyrannous in all ages of the world!--yet we do not hesitate to insult the Creator of the whole Cosmos by endowing Him with this animal and un-God-like craving! He, who holds the starry heavens in the hollow of His Hand--from whose expressed Thought solar systems are born like blossoms in the fields of ether--He, whose vast love broods tenderly over all that He hath made, even to the nesting bird hidden under a bunch of green leaves--“not one shall fall to the ground without your Father”--even He it is whom daily we wrong and blaspheme by our social methods of life and forms of worship, by our deliberate opposition to His Laws, and by the amazingly insolent indifference we exhibit to His inviolate Will as shown through the reflection of His Mind in visible Nature. And so it happens that, after a certain space of time in which we are offered fresh chances of amendment or betterment which we seldom take, things begin to go wrong. We know not how or where the mischief first started, because it has stolen upon us by gradual and insidious degrees, and we never dream of looking for the root of the evil in ourselves or in our ancestry. But we do become slowly and reluctantly aware that we are not on the right track--that “something” is about to happen which will upset all our most cherished plans and push us off our present road of what we are pleased to call “progress” in a sufficiently disastrous manner. We have no time to retrace our steps and look for the way we have missed, for we find that we are running down hill with a singular self-imposed velocity which would make any sort of a stop almost impossible--while to go back would mean to climb a very steep and difficult ascent, an exercise for which we are neither prepared nor willing. We have no idea how we managed the muddle in which we find ourselves, but muddle it is and muddle it remains.