The Gospel of Evolution is replacing that of Christianity. Science is taking the place of Religion and yielding to mankind the poetry that its forerunner missed. Nature is our all in all. Only the whisper of a secret thought here and there of hers has yet reached our ears. But one. The only good result that is supposed to flow from prayer does not really flow from prayer at all, but is explicable by purely natural facts. It is healthier that people should know these facts, than that they should refer real sensations to an imaginary cause. This special re-action which under certain circumstances follows, but is not paused by prayer to a supernatural existence, forms but a minute part of the results which flow from belief in prayer. I desire to destroy prayer not only because it is a fraud, but because it is a hindrance to progress. Men pray to do that which they should link hands to perform for themselves. They are down on their knees, crying like children, when they should be on their feet, working, striving for their fellows. I grudge every moment of time that is given by man to god. Man wants all we can do; our heart, our brain, our love, our faculties, all, all these are sacred to man; they must not be desecrated to the use of god. It is sacrilege to steal for god the wealth needed for the enriching of man. Why, only a few weeks since I read a letter from the Dean of Peterborough, asking for £40,000 for the repair of Peterborough Cathedral. And men, women and little children are rotting in cellars in the very city wherein that letter was published. And he will get it. £40,000 are given so easily for a house of god, but 40,000 pence would be grudged to make decent the hovels in which human beings live. I hate the charity which pours out wealth for a god, and counts in miserly fashion every farthing given for man. There are no means of progress upon earth save those of study and of work. Study of nature to find out what is; work to apply the knowledge for the increase of human happiness. For centuries upon centuries men have prayed to god for deliverance from poverty, from misery, from crime; and poverty, misery and crime are found on every side. It is time that we should turn from god to man, from prayer to work, from dreaming to acting. Man shall do for earth what prayer has failed to do; and man's thought, man's love, man's sturdy effort shall make that Golden Age for which so many have prayed, but so few have worked. Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, at 63, Fleet Street, London, B.C.--1884. End of Project Gutenberg's The Gospel Of Evolution, by Edward Aveling