12 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTH LI'. 



so tremendous a realization of all that is meant by the fatal chain 

 of action and consequence a chain the links of which, fragile 

 and delicate and silken as they may seem, are yet woven in the 

 loom of eternity, and are never to be swept asunder, " Not 

 heaven itself upon the past hath power." Injustice, dishonesty, 

 impurity, wrong of every kind, will and must, in the everlasting 

 order of the world, work out their inevitable results, all our pray- 

 ers, all our remorse notwithstanding. 



. . . There's not a crime 

 But takes its proper change still out in crime, 

 When rung upon the counter of the world; 



and in the administration of the moral law there is no favoritism, 

 no bribery, no loophole of escape. 



While the deep realities of existence are thus made deeper and 

 more real, and while the earnestness of conduct and the solemnity 

 of true thought as well as of right action are thrust into almost 

 awful relief, we are forced, moreover, to give up, one by one, the 

 radiant visions of future progress which for thinkers of widely 

 different schools have touched with the glory of infinite promise 

 the hard and obstinate facts of life. The ghost of Malthus has 

 hardly been laid even by Spencerian incantations ; and the splen- 

 did dream of perfectibility, of the final evanescence of evil in 

 which the great evolutionary philosopher once loved to indulge 

 is, we must confess it, only a dream after all. The theory of 

 evolution, as Huxley has said, "encourages no millennial antici- 

 pations." The rhythm of life means the ultimate undoing of all 

 that can be done. " Many a planet by many a sun may roll with 

 the dust of a vanished race"; and the time must come, in the 

 dim and mysterious future, when our planet shall be one of these 

 when, in the striking words of Mr. Leslie Stephen, the earth 

 shall "become a traveling gravestone, and men and their dreams 

 shall have vanished forever." Hence, to quote the same thought- 

 ful writer, " we must be content with hopes sufficient to stimu- 

 late action," and must believe " in a future harvest sufficiently to 

 make it worth while to sow, or, in other words, that honest and 

 unselfish work will leave the world rather better off than we 

 found it." And when we study life at large from the point of 

 view here adopted, it may surely be urged that a large basis of 

 substantial hope is given in place of the fallacious and illusory 

 hopes that have been snatched away. A universe of law is, after 

 all, a universe that we can trust. Science teaches us to have con- 

 fidence in the nature of things; and cause and effect, as Emerson 

 put it, are indeed the "chancellors of God." How would any 

 such confidence be possible if the world were actually governed 

 by caprice, chance, miracle ? It is because we can throw our- 



