own ends. Throughout his wonderful career we find his Deity representative of his own growing powers, and of his own attitude towards the governing forces of Nature. His conception of God is, in fact, the chronicle in serial form of his evolution as an intellectual and spiritual creature, a chronicle which faithfully records his progress and reflects his changing conditions of life. A study of the religions of men of past ages is thus a study of the index of their lives, their thought, their social and moral status, enabling us to estimate their positions in the evolutionary scale of humanity. As we review this register of the life-stories of mankind, we find the idea of the nature of God[25] keeping pace with intellectual advance. But although the distinguishing characteristic of man, even in his crudest stage, is always his idea of and his worship of a Deity, mankind as a whole has never worshipped at any one time the same idea of God. In the past as well as in the present, the many religions existing and obtaining credence and support all over the inhabited world give a fair idea of the intellectual and moral status of the people they represent. The ethical value of any religion is not gauged by an estimate of the number of its devotees as compared with those of any other religion. Its existence merely represents the mental state of those who are its adherents. As a rule, a religious creed is built upon a supposed special revelation of God; but to the scientist religions appear also as revelations of mankind. To him their value is retrospective and deductive, inasmuch as they offer evidence of intellectual growth, which he perceives to be the natural precursor of those spiritual conceptions of the[26] nature of God which may become in course of time consolidated into dogmatic formulæ. The extinction or survival of a religious creed as an active force points to the extinction or survival of that type of mind of which the creed was the reflection. Progress forbids uniformity of type and equality of structure on the spiritual as well as on the physical plane of life. Change and variety of religious feeling are necessary to the evolution of the soul, and should be welcomed as evidence of its growth. But not until, from the several types of man now inhabiting the earth, one were proved fit to survive in the struggle for existence and capable of maintaining its supremacy, could mankind worship the same idea of God. If this should ever occur, the change in the spiritual consciousness of man might be as stupendous and of consequences as far-reaching as that crisis in his physical evolution when the brute, becoming apprehensive of a God, was born into spiritual life and became possessed of a soul. [27]