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30 duty towards that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now, the idol of a worshipful spirit of Nature also leads to sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be scientific, the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy from which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly and ceases to worry about their derivation from the “one and only Power.”

Here, then, on this stage of mere