THE TRUE PARADISE

The religion that has relations only to heaven and angels, or only to a
supreme being remote and detached from daily life and from our families
and friends, our business and affairs, issues in personal selfishness
and is one of the causes of social disorganization and need.

It postpones to that dim future the problems that ought to be solved in
the present. It promises those who are broken with the injustice and
greed of their fellows a place where right would prevail and rest would
be their portion in the future. It shifts to an imaginary and ideal
world all the perplexities and wrongs of the real present world.

That kind of teaching ingrained in generations accounts for the dull
patience, the stolid, brute-like content of the peasant in Europe; he
is born a bearer of burdens, a tiller of the soil, to walk bent and
never look up; it is all endurable because it is all so short; he some
day will be better off than kings and emperors are now.

But as the generations are born the inspiring vision of that future
loses its force; the ideals are gone and the children come into the
world with their fathers content with their present condition, but
devoid of aspiration and also devoid of their father's faith in the
compensations of the future.

Then comes the reaction. Some daring spirits assert that if there is
any good, if there is equity and rights, men ought to enter into and