“Conscious, mobile--inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer--see more clearly--see--” the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of despair--“No! No--oh, God--no!” Then clearly and solemnly: “And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up the thread once more--but clearly further on. Something we had missed between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence. “Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a garden and grave--and all these countless gods and goddesses only phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal forces man's instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his resistance weakens--the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and strength against itself--” A little pause; then came these singular sentences: “Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself godlike among the stars.” And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on: “Dominion over all the earth? Yes--as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts. “For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath--for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him--even as he wrested it from his ravening kind--as they took it from the reptiles--as did the reptiles from the giant saurians--which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic--and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn. “Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion! “Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity--and then--hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck. “Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.