From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to you for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to perfect it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to protect your infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflected your intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one after another, as they outlived their uses; until you are just now beginning to realize, that for all these many centuries you have been virtually worshipping yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time, share the fate of those which preceded it, and in the absence of a prevailing superstition, your seers luckily cannot build up for you another one. Your long period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is rapidly passing away, and your new age of rationalism is approaching. You have no just conception of the evils it will remove, and the glories it has in store for you. The difference between your present and future religion can be easily outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of erroneous teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not undertake to remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your religion of the future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief mission will be to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to a minimum. The impulses of your present religion are entirely apart from the moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by a glance over the every-day life of your people. Except in their observance of religious forms, your devout are not distinguished from your profane. The practical virtues are no greater among believers than among unbelievers. Your coming religion will be founded upon the moral sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will support no doctrine of a ready and convenient atonement for bad acts, as the present one does. It will teach you that there can be no complete reparation of an evil deed except in its undoing, and that such an act, once performed, spreads its dire consequences in accordance with its enormity over a part or the whole career of the doer. It will not undertake to unburden the conscience of a crime, nor to give assurance of celestial bliss to the most heinous of offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious compliance with religious forms.