Since it seemed that the new world must in all things follow in the ways of the old, the gentler deities who delighted not in blood would in due time reveal themselves to man grown capable of mercy. As the memory of judgment faded with the centuries—as the earth waxed fruitful and life was kindlier—humanity would dare to lift its head from the dust and the life religious would be more than blind cringing to a despot. The Heaven of the future would find room for gods who were gracious and friendly; for white Baldurs and Olympians who walk with men and instruct them; and there would arise prophets whose message was not vengeance, but a call to “rejoice in the Lord.” ... And in further time, it might be, the God who is a Spirit ... and a Christ.... The rise, the long, slow upward struggle of the soul of man was as destined and inevitable as its fall; all human achievement, material or spiritual, was founded in the baseness of mire and clay—and rose towering above its foundations. As the State, which had its origin in no more than common fear and hatred, in the end would be honoured without thought of gain and its flag held sacred by its sons; so Deity, beginning as vengeance personified, would advance to a spiritual Law and a spiritual Love. When the power of loving returned to the race, it would cease to abase itself and lift up its eyes to a Father—endowing its Deity with that which was best in itself; when it achieved and took pleasure in its own thoughts and the works of its hands, it would see in the Highest not the Vengeance that destroys but the Spirit that heals and creates. Meanwhile the foundation of the life religious was, and must be, the timorous virtue of ignorance, of humble avoidance of inquiry into the dreadful secrets of God. In Theodore’s youth he had turned from the orthodox religions, which repelled by what seemed to him a fear of knowledge and inquiry; now he understood that man, being by nature destructive, can survive only when his powers of destruction are limited; and that the ignorance enjoined by priest and bigot had been—and would be again—an essential need of the race, an expression of the will to live.... The jealous God who guards his secrets is the god of the race that survives.