may find somewhere by charity a place assigned them, as appendages, perhaps only as excrescences, of the material creation? I contend that Evolution in its highest form had not been a thing heretofore unknown to history, to philosophy, or to theology. I contend that it was before the mind of Saint Paul when he taught that in the fullness of time God sent forth His Son, and of Euscbius, when he wrote the "Preparation for the Gospel," and of Augustine when he composed the "City of God"; and, beautiful and splendid as are the lessons taught by natural objects, they arc, for Christendom at least, infinitely beneath the sublime unfolding of the great drama of human action, in which, through long ages, Greece was making ready a language and an intellectual type, and Rome a framework of order and an idea of law, such that in them were to be shaped and fashioned the destinies of a regenerated world. For those who believe that the old foundations are unshaken still, and that the fabric built upon them will look down for ages on the floating wreck of many a modern and boastful theory, it is difficult to see anything but infatuation in the destructive temperament which leads to the notion that to substitute a blind mechanism for the hand of God in the affairs of life is to enlarge the scope of remedial agency; that to dismiss the highest of all inspirations is to elevate the strain of human thought and life; and that each of us is to rejoice that our several units are to be disintegrated at death into "countless millions of organisms"; for such, it seems, is the latest "revelation" delivered from the fragile tripod of a modern Delphi. Assuredly on the minds of those who believe, or else on the minds of those who after this fashion disbelieve, there lies some deep judicial darkness, a darkness that may be felt. While disbelief in the eyes of faith is a sore calamity, this kind of disbelief, which renounces and repudiates with more than satisfaction what is brightest and best in the inheritance of man, is astounding, and might be deemed incredible. Nay, some will say, rather than accept the flimsy and hollow consolations which it makes bold to offer, might we not go back to solar adoration, or, with Goethe, to the hollows of Olympus?
"Wenn die Funke sprüht,
Wenn die Asche glüht,
Eilen wir den alten Göttern zu.[1]"
Translation.
"When the sparks glitter,
When the ashes glow.
We speed us to the old gods."
Nineteenth Century.
- ↑ "Braut von Corinth."
