found to be simply a well-meant superstition; nature swerves not for our pleading, nor falters in her path for our most passionate supplication. The "reign of law" in physical matters is becoming acknowledged even by theologians. As step by step the knowledge of _the natural_ advances, so step by step does the belief in _the supernatural_ recede; as the kingdom of science extends, so the kingdom of miraculous interference gradually disappears. The effects which of old were thought to be caused by the direct action of God are now seen to be caused by the uniform and calculable working of certain laws--laws which, when discovered, it is the part of wisdom implicitly to obey. Things which we used to pray for, we now work and wait for, and if we fail we do not ask God to add his strength to ours, but we sit down and lay our plans more carefully. How is this to end? Is the future to be like the past, and is science finally to obliterate the conception of a personal God? It is a question which ought to be pondered in the light of history. Hitherto the supernatural has always been the makeweight of human ignorance; is it, in truth, this and nothing else? I am forced, with some reluctance, to apply the whole of the above reasoning to every school of thought, whether nominally Christian or non-Christian, which regards God as a "magnified man." The same stern logic cuts every way and destroys alike the Trinitarian and the Unitarian hypothesis, wherever the idea of God is that of a Creator, standing, as it were, outside his creation. The liberal thinker, whatever his present position, seems driven infallibly to the above conclusions, as soon as he sets himself to realise his idea of his God. The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of which all things are evolved under the uncreated conditions and eternal laws of the universe; he must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat oddly puts it, "the materiality of matter, as well as the spirituality of spirit;" _i e._, these must both be products of this one substance: a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature, and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with nature, co-extensive with the universe; but the God of the orthodox no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality which divides him from the rest of the universe. I say that I use these arguments "with some reluctance," because many who have fought and are fighting nobly and bravely in the army of freethought, and to whom all free-thinkers owe much honour, seem