Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/66

52 a powerful weapon—prayer! It is difficult to despair when one believes that a word, a supplication, will remove any disturbing element from his path. To take an extreme case,—an aeronaut falls from the car of his balloon, a thousand feet high. If he is a freethinker, he knows that he is lost and that there is no power on earth that can prevent his body from being smashed to pieces on the ground beneath, in less than ten seconds. But if he is a believer in God, he retains during the entire extent of his fall, or at least until he loses consciousness, a hope that some superhuman power, to which he offers up supplications of intense fervor as he falls, will, to save him, suspend the laws of nature for a few minutes and deposit him gently and softly upon the ground. As long as he retains consciousness the impulse of self-preservation maintains its sway, and he clings obstinately to a visionary, superstitious possibility, even against such an irrevocable sentence of death as has been passed upon him. The human heart has no more precious possession than illusion. And what more beneficent and consoling illusion could there be than the self-deception of faith in God and prayer? In consequence of this fact the majority of mankind will continue to seek refuge from life's pains and griefs in conceptions founded on a childish superstition, until they become so impressed by and convinced of the necessity of viewing the world from the standpoint of natural science, that they learn to consider the death of an individual, even although it be their own, as a circumstance of the most trifling importance for their race and the — universe not until the solidarity of mankind has become so generally and firmly organized that each individual will turn instinctively for help to his fellow-men in any disasters that befall him, and not to an incomprehensible, supernatural power.