so tremendous a realization of all that is meant by the fatal chain of action and consequence—a chain the links of which, fragile and delicate and silken as they may seem, are yet woven in the loom of eternity, and are never to be swept asunder. "Not heaven itself upon the past hath power." Injustice, dishonesty, impurity, wrong of every kind, will and must, in the everlasting order of the world, work out their inevitable results, all our prayers, all our remorse notwithstanding.
But takes its proper change still out in crime,
and in the administration of the moral law there is no favoritism, no bribery, no loophole of escape.
While the deep realities of existence are thus made deeper and more real, and while the earnestness of conduct and the solemnity of true thought as well as of right action are thrust into almost awful relief, we are forced, moreover, to give up, one by one, the radiant visions of future progress which for thinkers of widely different schools have touched with the glory of infinite promise the hard and obstinate facts of life. The ghost of Malthus has hardly been laid even by Spencerian incantations; and the splendid dream of perfectibility, of the final evanescence of evil—in which the great evolutionary philosopher once loved to indulge—is, we must confess it, only a dream after all. The theory of evolution, as Huxley has said, "encourages no millennial anticipations." The rhythm of life means the ultimate undoing of all that can be done. "Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanished race"; and the time must come, in the dim and mysterious future, when our planet shall be one of these—when, in the striking words of Mr. Leslie Stephen, the earth shall "become a traveling gravestone, and men and their dreams shall have vanished forever." Hence, to quote the same thoughtful writer, "we must be content with hopes sufficient to stimulate action," and must believe "in a future harvest sufficiently to make it worth while to sow, or, in other words, that honest and unselfish work will leave the world rather better off than we found it." And when we study life at large from the point of view here adopted, it may surely be urged that a large basis of substantial hope is given in place of the fallacious and illusory hopes that have been snatched away. A universe of law is, after all, a universe that we can trust. Science teaches us to have confidence in the nature of things; and cause and effect, as Emerson put it, are indeed the "chancellors of God." How would any such confidence be possible if the world were actually governed by caprice, chance, miracle? It is because we can throw our-
