256 AGNOSTICISM VII 



could prompt the bitter jest, "Ut puto Dens fio." 

 No divinity doth hedge a modern man, be he 

 even a sovereign ruler. Nor is there any one, 

 except a municipal magistrate, who is officially 

 declared worshipful. But if there is no spark of 

 worship-worthy divinity in the individual twigs 

 of humanity, whence comes that godlike splen- 

 dour which the Moses of Positivism fondly 

 imagines to pervade the whole bush? 



I know no study which is so unutterably sad- 

 dening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it 

 is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the 

 darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the 

 marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He 

 is a brute, only more intelligent than the other 

 brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often 

 as not lead him to destruction ; a victim to 

 endless illusions, which make his mental existence 

 a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life 

 with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain 

 degree of physical comfort, and develops a more or 

 less workable theory of life, in such favourable 

 situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of 

 Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of 

 years, struggles, with varying fortunes, attended by 

 infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and misery, to 

 maintain himself at this point against the greed 

 and the ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a 

 point of killing and otherwise persecuting all 

 those who first try to get him to move on ; and , 



