120 At the Darkest Hour. 



But during twelve hundred years the average of human 

 life has not been raised more than twenty years, at most, 

 what hope, then, of greatly prolonging life in ages to 

 come? 



The reply is that the outlook cannot be correctly esti- 

 mated by this past slow gain on death. Through what 

 unwritten ages did man wander over prehistoric conti- 

 nents, a wretched, fireless troglodyte, a feeder on acorns 

 and berries, yet in one brief moment the first spark of fire 

 was struck, — fire which made him the rich owner of all 

 the metals, which opened a new realm of comfort, warmth, 

 and food and spread the race over vast regions hitherto 

 uninhabitable. In that single moment man rose to a 

 higher plane of existence. 



Within historic times, but four centuries ago, human 

 progress was vastly accelerated by a single discovery, 

 which was little more than a lucky accident. Up to the 

 times of Gutenberg, what progress had been made for three 

 thousand years in the art of book-making? Till then, 

 books had been laboriously copied with stile and pen and 

 so far as any one could then have foreseen, bade fair al- 

 ways to be thus tediously reproduced. A copy of the 

 Scriptures cost from two to three thousand dollars, equiva- 

 lent to six or nine thousands in this century ; but a single 

 decade saw the art of printing born. 



Dogmatic unbelief may be as greatly mistaken as dog- 

 matic faith. The times are ripe for great discoveries 



