conception of. It is, indeed, "chaos and ancient night." All the
forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling
against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the
winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling.

The world is more desolate than the caves from which they have
escaped. The forests are gone; the fruit-trees are swept away; the
beasts of the chase have perished; the domestic animals, gentle
ministers to man, have disappeared; the cultivated fields are buried
deep in drifts of mud and gravel; the people stagger in the darkness
against each other; they fall into the chasms of the earth; within
them are the two great oppressors of humanity, hunger and terror;
hunger that knows not where to turn; fear that shrinks before the
whirling blasts, the rolling thunder, the shocks of blinding
lightning; that knows not what moment the heavens may again open and
rain fire and stones and dust upon them.

God has withdrawn his face; his children are deserted; all the,
kindly adjustments of generous Nature are gone. God has left man in
the midst of a material world without law; he is a wreck, a fragment,
a lost particle,

{p. 228}

in the midst of an illimitable and endless warfare of giants.

Some lie down to die, hopeless, cursing their helpless gods; some die
by their own bands; some gather around the fires of volcanoes for
warmth and light--stars that attract them from afar off; some feast
on such decaying remnants of the great animals as they may find