Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people, admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race, white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when, in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued, tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic, not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.