Society assumes its beliefs under an impulse of progression, as much controlled by evolutionary laws as the organic substances of the Earth. No one can teach the world. With a free exercise of its intellectual faculty, it teaches itself. The power of an idea, among the moral forces, is in its corresponding with a proper stage of development to receive it. A solitary thought is useless, as a moral agent, without its already existing half-formed figments scattered about in society. Its power to move lies in the coalescence of its parts. Ideas and beliefs have been adopted at different stages of your civilization, and have served as great motors to progress, which, ages before, were enunciated without impression. Society rids itself of its rudimentary impressions and beliefs, in much the same manner that an animal, under changing environments, sheds its old organs and develops new ones. Every new belief affecting society is subservient to it, and is only adopted slowly and by degrees. If it be a truth making its way, its final installation is marked by an unquestioned acquiescence and an undisturbed tranquility. If an error, agitation and unrest mark the whole period of its accession. The coming of your Messiah was more than you have supposed, because grander and more imposing than its assumed supernaturalisms was its enthronement of two central ideas. One was the adoption of the sentiment of brotherhood as a means of adjusting the relations of men with each other, and the other was the inauguration of spiritual hope as a guide in the actions of life. Out of this beginning has come all that is good in your social progress. The general acceptance of these ideas, as agencies in your civilization, began its work by weakening the old society, and it finally destroyed it by extinguishing the bands of physical force which held it together. The cultivation of these inspirational beliefs in their purity, as they were bestowed upon you by the divine intelligence, would have soon brought to you the same peace and good will that they have shed upon the inhabitants of Mars; but you were not to be indulged so soon in this happy offering. The few who had been dominating the many for ages, appropriating their earnings, and even sacrificing their lives, in a lust for power and wealth, were not to let escape them so fine an opportunity to hold the simple-minded by a new agency, ten-fold more subjugating than the old method of coercion by force. The religious superstition of the age, a mere diversion for the untaught multitude, inert and unpromising, was vitalized by the infusion of these new, humane and spiritual impulses; and, with many added ingeniously contrived supernaturalisms, and an attractive moral code, it was built up into a system and organized into a society which has borne its heavy weight upon your progress, and spread its dominion more successfully than the war-like legions it supplanted. It has accomplished no good which is not entirely due