adaptability to the judgment of an originator, who can really judge and think. “I hope that I have made this plain to you; but what would be plain to us would not be plain to children, and still less to mankind in its infancy five thousand or fifty thousand years ago. I have especially endeavoured to discover what led these men of old, in many respects so uncultivated, to believe in something beyond, invisible, superhuman, supernatural. We can see from their language and from the oldest monuments of their religion that they early observed that something happened in the world. The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke, and asked himself and the sunshine. ‘Whence?’ he said; ‘stop, what is there? who is there?’ Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest work on earth, gave light, heat, life, growth, fruits. It was quite natural, then, to pay great honour to the sun; to be grateful to it, to appeal to it for light, heat, and increase. And therefore the sun became a God, _e.g._ a Deva (deus), which originally meant nothing more than light. But even then an old Inca in Peru observed that the sun was not free; could not, therefore, be a being, to whom man could be grateful, to whom he could pray. It is, said he, like a beast of burden, which must daily tread its appointed round. And although the worship of the sun was the religion of his country, and he himself was worshipped as a child of the sun, he renounced the ancient faith of his country, and became what is now frequently called an atheist; that is, he longed after a truer God. What say you to this Inca? This same thing occurred also in other lands, and instead of continuing to worship the sun and moon, the dawn, the storm-wind, or the sky, they worshipped that which must be behind it all, which was called Heaven-Father, Jupiter, and every conceivable name. These names were no longer to indicate the visible object, but Him who had thought and created the object, the thinker and ruler of the world. This is the fundamental idea from which all religions have arisen: not animism, fetishism, totemism, or whatever the little tributaries may be called, which have poured for thousands of years into the main stream. Every people has produced its own religion, its own language, in the course of thousands of years; later, religions have been framed for all mankind, and we are still engaged in that task, even in what you call that clap-trap of Chicago. Even though we have all been born and educated in some religion, we nevertheless have the right, even the duty, like the old Inca, to examine every article of our hereditary religion, to retain it or to cast it aside, according to our own judgment and conception of the truth. Only the fundamental principle must remain; there is a thinker and a ruler of the universe.