The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions
without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard
pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding
over speculative pollution to the cynics and the 'righteous overmuch'
who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to the
nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appreciate the
grandeur of the place Man occupies therein.

Nay more, thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences of
traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has
sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will
discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of
faith in his attainment of a nobler Future.

They will remember that in comparing civilised man with the animal
world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring
into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and
roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the
awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe
the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all,
the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean
furnaces--of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward
forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory.

But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead
of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of
intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of the
uninstructed beholder.

And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will