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 WHAT IS RELIGION? 311

case now with the Christian nations. TTiey are all in one and the same condition of having rejected religion; and, therefore, notwithstanding dissensions among themselves, they are all united and form one con- federate band of robbers, among whom theft, plunder, depravity and murder, individually or collectively, goes on without causing the least compunction of con- science, and even with the greatest self-complacency, as occurred the other day in China, Some believe in nothing, and are proud of it ; others pretend to believe in what they for their own advantage hypnotize the common folk into accepting as a faith ; while others, again — the great majority, the common people as a whole — accept as a faith the hypnotic suggestions to which they are subjected, and slavishly submit to all that is demanded of them by the dominant and un- believing hypnotizers.

And what these hypnotizers demand is, what Nero and all like him, who have tried in some way to fill the emptiness of their lives, have always demanded : the satisfaction of their insane and superabounding luxury. Luxury is obtained in no other way than by enslaving men, and as soon as there is enslavement luxury increases ; and the increase of luxury inevitably drags after it an increase of slavery ; for only people who are cold and hungry, and bound down by want, will con- tinue all their lives long doing not what they want, but what is wanted only for the pleasure of their masters.

In chapter vi. of the Book of Genesis there is a profound passage in which the author says that God, before the Flood, having seen that the spirit He had given to men that they might serve Him was used by them only to serve their own desires, became so angry with men that He repented of having created them, and, before entirely destroying them, decided to shorten the life of man to 120 years. And the very thing that, according to the Bible, then so provoked God's anger that it caused Him to shorten man's life, is again going on among the people of our Christian world.