The fact is, churches and scriptures and dogmas are the outcome of that religious element which is inherent in human nature. It cannot be too often or too strongly urged that the religious principle is _innate_ and _ineradicable_ in mankind, and that you might as well try to destroy man’s love of the beautiful, his desire for knowledge, his love of home and kindred, or even his appetite for food, as to try to destroy it. It is as natural to feel the want of religion as it is to be hungry. You _cannot_ destroy the foundations of religion. They rest in _nature_ and antedate all creeds and churches, and will survive them. Even Professor Tyndall says: “The facts of religious feeling are to me as certain as the facts of physics.” ... “The world will have religion of some kind.”... “You who have escaped from these religions into the high and dry light of intellect may deride them, but in doing so you deride accidents of form merely, and fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the nature of man. To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems at this hour.” Renan also writes thus: “All the symbols which serve to give shape to the religious sentiment are imperfect, and their fate is to be one after another rejected. But nothing is more remote from the truth than the dream of those who seek to imagine a perfected humanity without religion.”... “Devotion is as natural as egoism to a true-born man. The organization of devotion _is_ religion. Let no one hope, therefore, to dispense with religion or religious associations. Each progression of modern society will render this want more imperious.” We use the word religion as it was used by Cicero, in the sense of _scruple_, implying the consciousness of a natural obligation wholly irrespective of what one may believe concerning the gods. Religion in its true meaning is the great fact of _duty, of oughtness_, consisting in an honest and persistent effort to realize ideal excellence and to transform it into actual character and practical life. Religion as a _spirit_ and a life is objected to by none, but is admired and commended by all. It is superstition, bigotry, credulity, and dogma that are detestable. The religious instinct has been perverted, turned into wrong channels, made subservient to priestcraft and kingcraft, but its basic principle remains for ever firm. If it _could_ have been destroyed, the machinations of priests would have annihilated it long ago. Give yourselves no anxiety about the corner-stone of religion, but look well to the rotten superstructures that have been reared upon it. Its professed friends are often its real enemies. It is the false prophet who is afraid to have his oracles subjected to tests of reason and history. It is the evil-doer who is afraid of the light, the conscious thief who objects to being searched. An honest man would say, “Let the truth be published, though the heavens fell.”