184 The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 



when the animal kingdom branched off from a shell to a 

 back-bone, and from a Megalosaur to a Microlestes. But the 

 wisdom wliich has been vindicated of her children in the 

 kingdom of animals will just as surely be vindicated of them 

 in that of spirit. And if the friends of religion want to 

 defend it most effectively of all, is it not plainly along the 

 line of its interior development, rather than along that of 

 building it into creeds and fortifying it with logic, that 

 their work should be done ? 



" Than tyrant's law or bigot's ban 



More miglity is tlie simjjlest word, 

 The free heart of an liouest man 

 Than crosier or the sword," 



Going now a step further, does not the same principle 

 hold good with regard to morals, right, reform, and that 

 greatest of all organisms, society itself ? These things 

 are precious beyond all price, have grown up to their 

 present condition through enormous toil and suffering, 

 would mean, in their loss, what never, perhaps, could be re- 

 stored ; and so it is not strange that men should seek to 

 protect and promote them with rigid precepts, with stern 

 prohibitory laws, with great bodies of police and with all 

 the weapons of courts, jails, scaffolds and penal legislation. 

 It may indeed be impossible yet to abolish such things alto- 

 gether, as the safeguards of society. Nevertheless, even 

 while using them, must it not be acknowledged that they 

 belong to the Triassic and Mesozoic rather than to human 

 social States ; are Nature's methods in the oyster and the 

 clam, the lobster and the lion, rather than in the man ; 

 are the use for defense, of shell and scale, tooth and claw, 

 instead of sense and soul ? Whatever the good tliey do, 

 their defects are the same as have been found in all outside 

 arms and armor, from tlie brutes up. The moral vitality, 

 alike of the individual and of society, goes into their ])ro- 

 duction and support, away from inward growth. The 

 stronger and better they are made for any one period and 

 condition of things, the less easy it is to adjust them to 

 the world's changes, and the less lit they are for those 

 which follow. What is the effort to put down increasing 

 crime by increasing laws, an experiment that every unfold- 

 ing social State goes through, but a renewal of the old 

 contest between stronger scale and stronger claw, stouter 



