their intuitions for occult knowledge, and has been able to unfold in part the secret of the true relations of man to his Maker. This marks a stupendous advance in Theosophy, or the knowledge of the Infinite. Nowhere in his investigations and interrogations of Nature has the scientist found a principle of evil; nowhere any foundation for a belief in the existence of so monstrous a character as the Jehovah of the Jews, or his august antithesis, the Devil; nowhere any evidence of the "Fall of Man"; nowhere a Creator that required an atoning sacrifice in order to reconcile himself to his creatures. On the contrary, he has found everywhere evidence, not of a merciful Creator, for man does not need mercy, but of a divine Beneficence running through every kingdom of Nature, embracing every human haunted thing—

"All things that live His goodness show,
In heaven above and earth below."

Indeed, this Beneficence in Nature is the foundation of the physician's art. His success in curing the sick and the resolutions of surgical operations and procedures are predicated upon the divine law of vis conservatrix naturæ. Upon this law the physician and surgeon confidently rely, assured that it will never fail them, be the subject of a malady or a surgical operation a believer in God or an unbeliever in Him; a bad

man or a good man; a miserable reprobate or a religious devotee. God is no respecter of persons in the sick-chamber. There the wicked fare as well as the righteous; the poor as well as the rich. In the domain of the instinctive or unconscious world, the physicists have discovered no natural laws broken, but everywhere natural laws fulfilled; no mercy shown to the delinquent, socalled, but everywhere justice done; no penalties inflicted that are punitive, but only those which are remedial-that is, in the interest and for the well-being of the unhappy victim of ignorance, disease, and misfortune. The idea of mercy and forgiveness is a fiction of a paternal Governor and government; it is no part of the scheme of the Kosmos and the wisdom of the Creator. Mercy implies forgiveness of misdeeds, withholding the rod when it is deserved and indispensable, than which nothing could be worse for the erring. God's penalties for wrongdoing act automatically. They are not punitive, but sanative and salutary, and the soul that aspires for betterment could not afford to have them suspended or withheld for a moment.

It is to be regretted that Christians do not heed a deduction so logical, and obey Christ's injunctions to pray in secret, to forego public praying, to cease crying for mercy, and behave toward their Maker like self-respecting men and women, and not like craven sycophants. Let them confess their offences against good morals, of

course, but avoid begging for forgiveness of sins of which they are guilty, no doubt, and for which "punishment" should be administered. Let them give thanks for life and its felicities and cultivate a grateful spirit; let them beg that the chastening rod may be laid on and not withheld. Forgiveness of sins! They know not for what they ask. One such act on the part of the Creator would wreck the moral order of the world.

We repeat that on every hand physicists have found displayed Beneficence, Wisdom, Justice, and Goodness. Nowhere throughout the marvellous works of that creative Force called God have they found an exception.

We are not ignoring in this connection the apparent existence of evil, nor of that misnomer of the theologians, technically called sin. But we beg to maintain that evil is a misconception of the divine Economy. It should be clearly understood that, according to the demonstrations in anthropology and morphology, both being collateral sciences of medicine, man is in a state of evolution. He is on the way from savagery to the characteristically human plane, as typified in the divine Nazarene. During this progress he must needs pass through a variety of planes of development, each one of them having laws and customs (morals) peculiar to itself. In the order of moral progress, the idea of laws of nature being broken is a misconception. Man never breaks or violates a law of his being. He is never beyond the pale

of law. Disease has laws no less than health. Breaking a law of nature is just as impossible an act on man's part as it is for the molecule to disobey the laws of matter. It is the law above his nature that man fails to obey or conform to; the laws of other men, not those of his own; arbitrary rules of conduct to which his nature is foreign and rebellious, the disregard of which affords the basis of the conception of law broken, of evil and of sin-the latter term being a purely theological conception. That which is good law and moral on a lower plane of existence would naturally be bad law and unmoral on a higher plane, and so on through each succeeding plane of development. So long as an individual obeys the laws of his plane and he has no wish or power to do otherwise -he is no sinner, nor even an offender. But when such an indvidual happens to be transplanted to, or projected on to, a higher plane of society, he is naturally in conflict with the laws and customs of that plane and becomes an offender, subject to such penalties as the social régime of that plane has prescribed for offences, whatever they may be.

In the police courts to-day one may find frequent illustrations of our contention. Civilization is permeated by types of men varying all the way from the lowest savage to the highest known type of the human species. It should be no surprise that the lower types do not conform to our laws and customs but insist upon acting in accordance

with their own.

Some of them come from foreign countries; others are products of our own country, being the unfortunate victims of the disharmony of our own social conditions in the marital relations, such as faulty wedlock, selfish indulgence, and mal-environment, leading to freaks of heredity and causing a reversal of types, or atavism.

The medical sciences have accomplished a great work of far-reaching importance in the domain of abnormal moral causation, or morbid psychology, to which this subject is related. Further investigation is needed for the demonstration of the problems involved which lie within the province of the profession of medicine. The sins of Christendom are widespread, and the degenerate trend, wherever it exists, must be legitimate—that is to say, in accordance with the laws of morbid causation. The abnormal habits of one generation are aggravated in their effects upon the next. Such is the law of hereditary descent, from which there is no escape. The self-indulgent should reflect upon these things. It is worth his while to know that there is reason for the induction that the morphine habit, alcoholism, cocaine addiction, excessive indulgence in tobacco and other narcotics which disturb the healthy activities of the nervous system, are among the chief causes of moral degeneration. The baleful influences of these indulgences are especially felt upon the generative function, it is believed.

Let us not hold God responsible for these