making, foes by our own strenuous and persevering efforts, with God's good and ever-present help, to be destroyed. We strive and combat for the triumph of good sense over folly, of holiness over sin, of righteousness over iniquity, of honesty over deceit, of purity over sensuality, of law over violence, of knowledge over ignorance, of truth over error, and all that can be implied-and what is there not implied?-in the final triumphant victory of the love of God over love of self.

In such words and with such a purpose does the Universal Church address itself to the world, and place its cause in the hands of all good and enlightened men, firm in its faith in God, full of hope for the future, and with no misgiving as to its final and complete triumph over all its foes, and those only can be its foes, who are opposed to the spiritual and temporal welfare of the human race, and the progress of civilisation throughout the world.

CHAPTER I.

THE UNITY OF GOD.

FROM the earliest recorded times down to the present day, the existence of one Supreme Being, from whom all things do proceed, and through whom all things live, and move, and have their being, has been recognised and taught by the most enlightened men among all nations, and in all systems of belief.

Whether implanted in the human mind, and co-existent with the first formation of man, or whether subsequently notified to man by special revelation from his Creator, matters not, the fact remains undeniable.

In the grossest and most polytheistic forms of the ancient mythologies known to us, still, among many gods, the One great final cause of Creation has been ever recognised as Lord over all. The ignorance and superstition of the many, and the craft, and love of power of the few, those prolific sources of human error in all the

churches, have caused this sublime and simple truth to be partially lost sight of again and again. Wilful and interested perversion of the truth by some, and the ready credulity of others, have led at various times to its neglect, subversion, and near extinction; but never, as we believe, completely so at any period of the world's history; and from age to age, from nation to nation, the torch of truth, though often nearly spent, has been handed down to us, by the providence of God Himself, as a light destined finally to show all the inhabitants of the world, the path, which leads to His presence-before the inextinguishable and searching blaze of which the darkness of error and deceit shall be driven away, and disappear like the obscurity of night before the glorious rays of the heavenly

sun.

At the present time, the principal nations of Europe— that continent which boasts itself to be, the centre and source of all modern civilisation--do but vaguely perceive the incalculable value, the absolute necessity of insisting on this fact, viz., that there is one only God, the Creator, Sustainer, Preserver, and Perfecter of the entire universe and all that therein is, to Whom alone is to be ascribed all honour, glory, might, majesty and power.

As we have before said, this great and sublime truth, the very foundation and only sure base of all true religion, has been known and acknowledged in all past ages; but, from whatever motive, whether from love of power, the selfish desire of exclusive wisdom, the petty pleasure of deceiving others, the greed of wealth and self-glorification, the natural tendency of humanity to superstition, the result of error grafted on error thoughtlessly admitted, the belief among the enlightened few, that the ignorant multitude could only be kept in order through fear and in a state of ignorance, could only be induced to worship any God by means of a visible representation of His person or attributes; from whatever motives, with whatever intentions, it remains certain, that in all religions there have been mysteries, so called; hidden wisdom, leading to secret rites, only known to the few, and public rites, ceremonies and doctrines; the first for the initiated, the latter for the crowd, the "profanum vulgus," the swine before whom these pearls of wisdom and spiritual

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knowledge were not to be thrown lest they should turn and rend the giver. The Esoteric doctrine then was for the few, the Exoteric for the many for the sake of the first a favoured class was instituted, possessing certain knowledge, which it considered of the most vital use and importance to itself, but did not judge desirable or fit for the people at large to be acquainted with, or to discuss in any way. The Unity of God would appear to have been one of the main points of such Esoteric doctrine, and rather than impart this knowledge to their poorer fellowcreatures, whether poorer in wealth, power, or intelligence, the initiated class, of which the priests formed the vast majority, were willing to admit, and did allow, encourage and uphold, the grossest forms of idolatry and superstition, teaching that all value should be ascribed to the due performance of certain established external rites and ceremonies, and not on the attainment of spiritual love and truth, and a life founded thereon. Thus priests were no longer the ministers of God or good, enlightening and assisting mankind in their onward progress, but became ministers in the service of the devil or evil, deceivers of their fellow men, and hypocrites before the world and before God. Christianity in its purity sought to free the world from this state of spiritual bondage and blindness; to drive the priest and his dark shadow from between man and his Maker; to make religion free as the air we breathe, free to all, to the meanest in station as to the mightiest, to the lowest intelligence as to the highest; yes, to render the first principles of religion free to all, as the air we breathe and the sun that warms and vivifies us, was the direct intention and would have been the sure result of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and of his immediate successors in the holy mission. To dispel all unnecessary mystery, which Truth abhors as Nature does a vacuum; to break through the thralls of an interested and depraved priesthood, who had turned God's truth into a lie; to enounce definite views regarding the Creator, immortality, and man's duties; to make religion an active principle of everyday life for all men would have been assuredly one of the principal results of Christ's doctrines. But the old leaven still was not got rid of: the Jews of the earliest Church, not without some show of reason, at

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once put in a prior claim to election; and had it not been for the energy of others, would have enforced an exclusive claim to the favours of their new deity. A greater danger than this however, was to be encountered, and could not be avoided. The new Church could not cope with the old superstition, it coalesced with its adversary, and soon embraced the very enemy it was intended to combat; it adapted its oldest superstitions and adopted its newest philosophy. As time flew on, the many became too powerful for the few; the rites and ceremonies, the glitter and glare, the transient emotions and sensual delights of the old creeds passed into and commingled with the new. Christianity was made a state religion-an instrument to be used by a few for the governance of the many; it was no longer the Church of Jesus, that Jesus whose only sacrifice to God was a heart purified and sanctified, whose temple was not one made by hands, and who spoke his plain and simple truths and doctrines, freely or in simple parables, to all who chose to listen to them and might understand them; who addressed himself especially to the poor and unlearned without much mystery and without any ritual. The pure Church of Jesus, never of great extent, ceased almost to exist, and the old mythology subtilly disguised, with its gods greatly reduced in number, but still all too many, kept, and extended, its hold on the nations of Europe, of Asia, and of Africa. It still retained under new names some of its "Dii majores," its Jove, its Apollo, its Diana, and in the celestial hierarchy and in the new saints its "Dii Minores."

In Asia and Africa after a few centuries of increasing degradation, Mahomet and his followers destroyed the power and practice of polytheism wherever they met it with a holy fury, and spread the blessing of a firm belief in the unity of God over a great portion of the then known globe. In later times, part of Europe broke through the trammels of the idolatrous Church of Rome, and in place of worship or prayer to images, the soulenslaving doctrines of superstition, and the blinding glare of external pomp and show, once more sought to make religion free. Then Protestantism arose, but in lacking the principle of one only God, one in spirit and in substance, the only supreme Governor of the Universe, it failed to lay hold of the one fundamental and vital prin

ciple of true religion, without which it seems ordained of God, that no church shall endure but for a time only.

Thus at this day, the greater number of the inhabitants of Europe practically, indeed both in doctrine and in fact, do still believe in and adore more gods than One. Popery is practical Polytheism, and Protestantism actual Tritheism.

The first is positive idolatry in its most objectionable form, in which carved and coloured images and other representations of gods and of human beings are publicly exposed by the priesthood for the people to kneel down to, to adore, to pray to, and to propitiate in direct and flagrant opposition to the commands promulgated through God's own actual voice, as recorded in those writings. which they profess to hold sacred because emanating from God himself, and which they pronounce it eternal damnation to disbelieve. Hypocrites! out of your own mouths, by your own sacred Scriptures, and by your own deeds, do you stand condemned in the eyes of God and man, as criminals and rebels against His holiness and His laws.

The Protestant churches, though at present freed from this most grievous and deplorable crime of idolatry, in the sense of bowing down before graven images, and fashioning stocks and stones into figures which are a profanation to the majesty and perfection of the Deity, do still not worship that God alone, who in the Scriptures, held equally sacred by them as by the Papists, has revealed to them that He is a Spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth: who by His actual voice has declared to them in the plainest terms that He is One, and that there is no other God but Him; and also, that no man hath seen God at any time. In spite of all this, and in defiance of such positive and distinct declarations, they teach that God not only has been seen of men, but has lived as a man on this earth. That there are, moreover, three Gods, each one distinct both in essence and in substance, which yet are not really three Gods, but one only both in essence and in substance, and yet again three distinct Gods whenever the spirit moves them to act separately, stringing together indeed such a miserable tangle of words and ideas, such a farrago of contradictions, that any clear idea of what God really can be is positively unintelligible to even the most acute intellect. It is true