by our will, and amid the conditions of these inviolable sequences we
live, from these we cannot escape. One choice alone is ours: to live in
harmony with them or to disregard them; violate them we cannot, but we
can dash ourselves against them; then the law asserts itself in the
suffering that results from our flinging ourselves against it, or from
our disregarding its existence; its existence is proved as well by
the pain that results from our disregard of it, as by the pleasure
that results from our harmony with it. Only a fool deliberately and
gratuitously disregards a natural law when he knows of its existence;
a man shapes his conduct so as to avoid the pain which results from
clashing with it, unless he deliberately disregards the pain in view of
a result to be brought about, which he considers to be worth more than
the purchase price of pain. The Science of Morality, of Right Conduct,
"lays down the conditions of harmonious relations between individuals,
and their several environments small or large, families, societies,
nations, humanity as a whole. Only by the knowledge and observance of
these laws can men be either permanently healthy or permanently happy,
can they live in peace and prosperity. Where morality is unknown or
disregarded, friction inevitably arises, disharmony and pain result; for
Nature is a settled Order in the mental and moral worlds as much as in
the physical, and only by knowledge of that Order and by obedience to
it can harmony, health and happiness be secured."

The religious man sees in the laws of Nature the manifestation of the
Divine Nature, and in obedience to and co-operation with them, he sees
obedience to and co-operation with the Will of God. The non-religious
man sees them as sequences he cannot alter, on harmony with which his
happiness, his comfort, depends. In either case they have a binding
force. The man belonging to any exoteric religion will modify by them
the precepts of his Scriptures, realising that morality rises as