372 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



ence, Carefulness, Tenderness, Sympathy, and Self- 

 Sacrifice will have rooted themselves in Humanity. 

 See then what the Savage Mother and her Babe 

 lave brought into the world. When the first 

 '^Mother awoke to her first tenderness and warmed 

 her loneliness at her infant's love, when for a 

 moment she forgot herself and thought upon its 

 weakness or its pain, when by the most imper- 

 ceptible act or sign or look of sympathy she ex- 

 pressed the unutterable impulse of her Motherhood, 

 the touch of a new creative hand was felt upon 

 the world. However short the earliest infancies, 

 however feeble the sparks they fanned, however 

 long heredity took to gather fuel enough for a 

 steady flame, it is certain that once this fire began 

 to warm the cold hearth of Nature and give 

 humanity a heart, the most stupendous task of the 

 past was accomplished. A softened pressure of an 

 uncouth hand, a human gleam in an almost animal 

 eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice — feeble 

 things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay 

 the hope of the human race. " From of old we 

 have heard the monition, ' Except ye be as babes 

 ye cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven ' ; the 

 latest science now shows us — though in a very 

 different sense of the words — that unless we had 

 been as babes, the ethical phenomena which give 



