“But we deny, utterly, the essential badness of man, and our denial is based on the sure fact that as man grows in stature, so, _pari passu_, he grows in goodness. We believe that man, unaided by miracles, can increase in goodness just by the virtue of the goodness that is in life, a seed in the cave man, a flower in the civilised; we believe that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have produced better ethical result than all the teaching of the Apostles, simply because those great fibres of communication have enabled men to develop by mutual touch and the good in each individual man to rush upward and find a vast field of new growth in the field of universal good, a field that shines now, like a star galaxy above the hell of darkness of a hundred years ago.
“We believe that the minds of men, like the bodies of men, are filled with old left-offs and fissures, and that just as some men are born with the gills of fishes, through whose forms their beings once passed, so some men are born with the thoughts of the reptiles they once were, and that the hells of the priests and the sensuous and painted heavens, the asceticism that kills joy, the persecutions and mutilations, and mummeries and terrors under which men have groaned for two thousand years have arisen, not from Religion, but from old defects in the mind of man equivalent to defects in his body, like, for instance, the vermiform appendix. These defects have taken the good food that Christ gave the mind of man and turned it, not into nourishment, but into causes of inflammation. Saurian hatred is bound up with Religion; superstitions from the time of the cave men, a spirit of simian persecution from the times of the tree men, and lust; all these vile left-overs clinging to the mind of the individual man, as the Pineal eye and vermiform appendix cling to his body, have made Religion an impossible food for the advancement of ethics beyond a certain point.
“Now mark this. The universal mind knows not lust; hates persecution; abhors cruelty, and is preparing to free itself from superstition.
“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.