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A fire-mist and a planet, a crystal, and a cell;

A jelly fish and a saurian, and caves where the cave men dwell;

Then a sense of law and beauty, and a face turned from the clod

Some call it evolution and others call it God."

As soon as possible in life one should ask of himself the question, "Why am I here?" And when he has found the correct answer, he should follow it up diligently if he would know happiness. A proper viewpoint is everything in life for it enables us to seek out the law and comply with it. This book attempts to give that answer and to point out the way as well. It tells of health, happiness and salvation to be attained now, not in some distant, uncertain future. It teaches the religion of Christ freed from dogma and creed. It should not be read continuously but taken up from time to time and quietly perused. One should read it through first, omitting the notes, so as to get the trend of thought, and a second time with the notes. It should be reread, and favored passages marked.

I deplore the fact that when I collected my data I had no idea of writing a book and so in several instances where I have made a quotation I have been unable to give the author's name; also that I have had to omit so many really valuable notes.

I claim that this interpretation of religion founded as it is on a philosophical and scientific basis, will increase greatly one's powers to meet the requirements of every-day life, in all its aspects, from a business, social and religious standpoint, and will accomplish results.

Man-God's Masterpiece

CHAPTER I

In the beginning "was the word," and the word was God, later on, a burning mass with no appearance of vegetable or animal life. After millions of years the sphere had become sufficiently cooled to allow of a solid formation, a chaos of barren rocks, bleak, bare and forbidding, surrounded by a stifling atmosphere and surging clouds. Later on water was deposited from the surrounding vapor, introducing with it organized life, when the temperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbon dioxide, were at hand. But through it all, as it proceeds, we recognize the workings of a master mind, and we trace it developing into the present beautiful world, becoming ever more and more spiritual, and better fitted as an abode for man, who likewise is daily becoming more refined; and, as the spirit asserts its dominancy, will earth and man become more attractive and lovable.

When at last man arrived * he was very weak and defenseless, compared with many of the larger animals and from all outward appearances, no one at that time would have conceived him to be the future ruler of all animal life,-this coward who lived in constant fear of larger animals, of the convulsions of nature, and of his own kind as well. In the New York Museum of Natural History is a brontassaur sixty-six feet long and weighing in life forty thousand pounds, and out west is another more than twice as large as this one; yet insignificant man, using really only one-thousandth part of his brain, has proven the superior of them all. What may he be

* Man came from a species of manlike apes at the end of the Tertiary Period. The Riddle of the Universe, Haeckel, p. 14. "The differences between man and the great apes, are not as great as those between the manlike apes and the lower monkeys." Ibid, p. 70. "The fossil ape-man of Java is the much sought missing link." Ibid, p. 87. "The fact that man has all the equipment necessary to wag a tail, is evidence of his involution from the ape." Prof. Elliott Downing, Asst. Prof. Chicago University, says, "Man has one hundred and ninety-eight bits of organism that he once made use of," for instance, "in man the third eyelid is readily seen as a minute scale," serving no purpose whatever. Why is the nodule of bone in the arm where it can be of no possible use, etc., etc. Arcana of Nature, Tuttle, p. 240. Outside of his morality and spirituality, man is organically and functionally an animal. His embryonic growth proves this, he "commences at the foot of the scale, and advances over the whole vast interval that life has traversed since its early dawn." "Man at first is a