248 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



tiquity to be the best guide in religious belief. 

 Lucan's line is well known, as an echo of universal 

 thought: 'Dixitique semel nascentibus Auctor, 

 Quidquid scire licet' 'Whatever it was right for 

 man to know, the Creator made known to His 

 first creatures.' 



"Again the most excellent maxims of morality 

 have been found not only among the Jews, but 

 also 'among the Persians, Babylonians, Bactrians, 

 Indians, Egyptians, Arabs, etc., who all concur in 

 assigning the origin of these maxims to a primeval 

 tradition, and in asserting that religious truth was 

 first communicated to earth from Heaven. There 

 must be some foundation for this." 1 



Of the decline of civilized nations into barbar- 

 ism or semi-barbarism, we have countless in- 

 stances. We need but refer to the sinking of the 

 entire world into such a decline with the fall of 

 Rome and Greece. Even the barbarian con- 

 querors of the empire of the earth had in many 

 instances imbibed no little of the culture of Rome, 

 with whose civilization they had been made very 

 familiar. Yet when the world gradually emerges 

 again into the light of history, after the long dark- 

 ness of unrecorded days, what do we witness but 

 a civilization beginning anew with the most rudi- 

 mentary training in agricultural pursuits, taught 

 it by the patient and heroic monks ! 



Except for the Church, literature and art, with 



1 Robert Kane, S. J., "God or Chaos," pp. 183, 184. 



