"Their minds reflect only the minds of men. I think now that all the trouble, all the distress, and all the muddle come from the arrogance of men, who have always preferred the reflection of life in the flattering mirror of their minds to life itself. They have dropped the bone for the shadow, when they might have had both. They could have admired the shadow and eaten the bone; but, in the folly of their arrogance, they have thrown both away. . . . They must be almost as great a trial to God as they are to themselves. God is very merciful, since, though they will not love, yet He allows them to die. The mistake is understandable. A man's eyes, all his senses, assure him that he is the centre of the universe. Quite obviously his senses lie, but it is often difficult to see the obvious. There cannot be more than one centre of the universe, and, if a man will only reflect for a moment, he will see that all his neighbours, his dog, the tree in his garden--if he has a garden--every star in the sky, must be victims of the same delusion. Unhappily, though man has lived on this world for thousands of years, he has not yet made the small mental effort necessary for the slight correction of his senses. It has taken him thousands of years to discover that this earth on which he has his dwelling is not the centre of the solar system. That was a shock to his vanity, and his endeavour since then has been to prove his own all-importance in the scheme of things. He has turned to and pigeon-holed his knowledge and called it science. He has become increasingly adventurous and busy, simply because of the restlessness that has come over him on being confronted with his mistakes. He has discovered the whole habitable globe and proceeded to defile it. In my lifetime he has blundered into the discovery of steam-power, electricity, and they talk of oil as a generator of more power. I have seen many changes, but always it has come back to the same thing. The principles of life are few and simple. Every discovery puts a girdle round the earth, every invention that liberates man in body and mind makes the command sound clearly and more loud: 'Thou shalt love and thou shalt die. . . .' With every discovery however the egoism of mankind waxes more and more fat and they stop their ears to the command. They insist that they are the crowning achievement and purpose of creation--the old delusion, you observe, of being the centre of the universe. Those who are most strongly obsessed by this delusion thrust those in whom the conviction is not so strong away from their path or down under their feet. They thrust and fight their way to the centres of human organisation, which they mistake for the centre of the universe, the point at which their centre-hood can be most openly declared for all men to see. They thrust and fight their way to power, only to find themselves powerless, for, in spite of themselves, in spite of the lies with which they are fed and feed