SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY SUSTAIN RELIGION 175 



chine. The higher intellectual powers were dwarfed in 

 the middle ages, when human life was made hideous 

 by famine, pestilence, perennial warfare and bloody 

 superstitions, fear of witchcraft and eternal tor- 

 ments, and men endured it because they had no 

 experience of anything better. But the change 

 wrought in six centuries is amazing, and shows 

 that human genius and man's possibilities are be- 

 yond our comprehension. The genius of Aristotle 

 proved that the earth is a globe, that of Coper- 

 nicus showed that it was one of a system of planets, 

 and that of Newton undertook to explain the laws 

 and dynamics of this marvelous sun and world 

 system. 



Belief in God, and the immortality of the soul, 

 and the compensations of a future life tend to main- 

 tain social order and moral rectitude, by enabling 

 men to endure the trials and injustice of this world 

 in the hope of ample compensation in the hereafter. 

 Man steps forth on this revolving globe not of his 

 own volition, but is sent here by some mysterious 

 power on some inscrutable mission to fulfill some 

 divine purpose. He comes as a spiritual wayfarer 

 under sentence of death. Not death to the spirit, 

 but to the transient habiliments of earth-dust he 

 gathers round his invisible spiritual form. When 

 he arrives and gathers his reasoning powers to 

 scan the narrow horizon of his life, he is beset by 

 perplexing problems of povert3% disease, sorrow, sin 

 and death. The " slings and arrows of outrageous 

 fortune" often overwhelm him, and he discovers at 

 last that the law of life is the law of growth and 

 development; and all these struggles and trials are 

 intended to evolve character and purify and ennoble 



