If the freethinkers firmly believe that in them dwell the hope for a better humanity, for an exhilarated progress, for universal freedom and liberty for all mankind, and emancipation from fear and superstition, then they, too, must destroy. They must first undo the wrong before they can proceed to build on a right foundation. They must build on the corner stone that all religion is human in its origin, erroneous in its theories, and ridiculous in its threats and rewards. Religion is the greatest impediment to the progress of human happiness. CHAPTER IV SOUNDNESS OF A FOUNDATION FOR A BELIEF IN A DEITY _It is better to bury a delusion and forget it than to insult its memory by retaining the name when the thing has perished_. F. H. BRADLEY. _A thousand miraculous happenings have been honoured by the testimony of the ancients, which in later times under a more exacting and sceptical scrutiny can no longer be believed. Inherent in man's nature is his disposition to be gulled.... Emotion is encouraged to supplant cool reason, fanaticism to supplant tolerance. Not by such means can our race be saved_. LLEWELYN POWYS. Our interplanetary visitor is firmly convinced that all religion, no matter what its antiquity or its modernity may be, is an invention of our groping earthly minds. It occurs to him that it would be interesting and proper to lay aside all theology, all creed, all the superficial trappings placed by man about his conceptions of a deity, and consider only the basic God-idea. The literature on the subject revealed to him that even on this broad and basic principle not all religionists were agreed. He found a threefold classification: (1) Those who held to the belief in an anthropomorphic personal God who was benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. (2) Those who saw in the constitution of our universe an impersonal Supreme Power, who had created the universe, but who had not given us any revelation, and thus has no need for worship by prayer and sacrifice. (3) Those who very recently conceived of the deity as a "cosmic force," an "ultimate," or as a mathematical or physical law. Such are the hypotheses of Jeans and Eddington. The Martian set about, therefore, with the principle that, "God is a hypothesis, and as such, stands in need of proof." (1) The belief in a personal God: