Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



that goose you stole last week." " Lor* missus,'* 

 replied the woman, "do ye think I'd let an old 

 goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed Lord 

 and Master ? " But joking apart, and however 

 necessary for man's ultimate evolution may be 

 the temporary development of this consciousness 

 of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition 

 of the mind in which it is absent is the most dis- 

 tinctively healthy ; nor can it be concealed that 

 some of the greatest works of Art have been pro- 

 duced by people like the earlier Greeks, in whom 

 it was absent ; and could not possibly have been 

 produced where it was strongly developed. 



Though, as already said, the latest stage of Bar- 

 barism, i.e., that just preceding Civilisation, is 

 unrepresented on the earth to-day, yet we have 

 in the Homeric and other dawn-literature of the 

 various nations indirect records of this stage; and 

 these records assure us of a condition of man very 

 similar to, though somewhat more developed than, 

 the condition of the existing races I have mentioned 

 above. Besides this, we have in the numerous 

 traditions of the Golden Age, 1 legends of the 

 Fall, etc., a curious fact which suggests to us that 

 a great number of races in advancing towards 

 Civilisation were conscious at some point or other 

 of having lost a primitive condition of ease and 

 contentment, and that they embodied this conscious- 

 ness, with poetical adornment and licence, in 

 imaginative legends of the earlier Paradise. Some 

 people indeed, seeing the universality of these 

 1 See Note at end of this chapter. 

 27 



