“How do I prove this? Take the press of the civilised world, which is an expression of the universal mind. Where is the place of lust there? Where is the place of Cruelty? Where is the place of Hate? Where is the place of Tyranny? I tell you this, that the mind universal is as far above the mind individual as the mind of a man is above the mind of a chimpanzee—in ethics. “An ordinary man dare not advance into the pure world of the mind universal one half of the thoughts, nay, one-fourth of the thoughts that fill his individual mind. He dare not preach the hatred that is in him or shew the lust that is in him, or the spirit of persecution, or even the spirit of intolerance; and the restraint upon him is not so much the fear of the police, or the fear of public censure, as a certain recognition in his own soul of ethical values and an instinctive horror of putting forth into pure light his deformities,—a recognition, in short, of the essential goodness of the world. Of course there are extraordinary men not so affected—so are there murderers and thieves. [Sidenote: The New Religion] “Now, I wish to be perfectly explicit about Religion, or, rather, about the new Religion which the world has received from Man. The new Religion which has advanced the world more in a hundred years than all the priest-ridden religions advanced it since the dawn of Time. “Its miraculous qualities arise from one fundamental fact. It knows not Individualism. “It is a simple recognition of fundamental Rights. It is not the individual laying down the law for other individuals (as in the churches); it is the universe of Man recognising the laws that brought it into being, and imposing those laws on the individual. It does not teach; it accepts. “The great teachers of the world laid down precepts, they formulated rules of conduct, and their scholars took precepts and formulæ and boiled men alive with them for coining, and hanged men with them for stealing, and burned women with them for witchcraft, and persecuted men with them for making the sign of the cross—or not making it, and twisted and bedevilled those precepts and formulæ into every shape that an individual mind could imagine. “The new Religion does not discard these precepts. “Its decalogue, in fact, is longer and more highly developed in parts than the old, but it does not preach its laws, it breathes them and lives by them. “More than that: it lives by the spirit of good, not by the letter. “The universal mind, for instance, denounces Theft, yet it recognizes that theft is a multifaced thing, some faces being almost innocent, others hideously cruel. A hundred years ago, a thief had only one face, one head, and one neck, by which he was hanged, if the theft amounted to more than—six-and-eightpence, was it?