Man Is An Evasive Beast, Given To

There Are A Score Of Great Religions In The World, Each With Scores Or Hundreds Of Sects, Each With Its Priestly Orders, Its Complicated Creed And Ritual, Its Heavens And Hells. Each Has Its Thousands Or Millions Or Hundreds Of Millions Of True Believers Each Damns All The Others With More Or Less Heartiness - And Each Is A Mighty Fortress Of Graft.

Man Is An Evasive Beast, Given To Cultivating Strange Notions About Himself. He Is Humiliated By His Simian Ancestry, And Tries To Deny His Animal Nature, To Persuade Himself That He Is Not Limited By Its Weaknesses Nor Concerned In Its Fate. And This Impulse May Be Harmless, When It Is Genuine. But What Are We To Say When We See The Formulas Of Heroic Self-deception Made Use Of By Unheroic Self-indulgence?

But The Devil Is A Subtle Worm; He Does Not Give Up At One Defeat, For He Knows Human Nature, And The Strength Of The Forces Which Battle For Him.

Human Beings Suffer Agonies, And Their Sad Fates Become Legends; Poets Write Verses About Them And Playwrights Compose Dramas, And The Remembrance Of Past Grief Becomes A Source Of Present Pleasure - Such Is The Strange Alchemy Of The Spirit.

Through Fasting. . .i Have Found A Perfect Health, A New State Of Existence, A Feeling Of Purity And Happiness, Something Unknown To Humans.