The Hour Before the Dawn. 107 



so surely and the progress has, on the whole, been so uni- 

 form and so well defined, that it appears highly improbable 

 that this great evolutionary effort is to end in mortal man, 

 incomplete as he is, with his many capacities for further 

 progress undeveloped. Such stupendous balks in the 

 order of nature occur only along the line of catastrophism ; 

 a cosmic catastrophe involving the solar system might 

 suddenly or slowly, end all things terrestrial. Otherwise 

 a reasonable expectation obtains that humanity will make 

 progress in the future as in the past. 



What inclines many students of history to take hopeless 

 views of man's future on earth is the contemplation of 

 races, peoples and nations that have risen to a degree of 

 greatness and power, and then declined. At short range 

 observation the Seres and Hindus, for example, seem to 

 furnish evidence that man can move through but a circum- 

 scribed arc of progress ; that the Cambodia and China of 

 to-day inevitably succeed every upward saltus of mankind. 

 Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, Greece, Rome, Baghdad, all pre- 

 sent similar instances of rise and fall. If the student re- 

 stricts his view to the history of any one nation in the 

 past, he may be led to form a similarly hopeless opinion. 

 The progress of humanity cannot be estimated by what 

 takes place in any one quarter of the world, during any 

 one century, or thousand years. Contrasted with what 

 the world was in the days of Pericles and Augustus, who 

 could have seen any hope for humanity in the year 700 



