only a few thousand years. Consider the result of our celestial
domestication for--let us say--several millions of years: I mean
the final consequence, to the wishers, of being able to gratify
every wish at will.

Those silkworms have all that they wish for,--even considerably
more. Their wants, though very simple, are fundamentally
identical with the necessities of mankind,--food, shelter,
warmth, safety, and comfort. Our endless social struggle is
mainly for these things. Our dream of heaven is the dream of
obtaining them free of cost in pain; and the condition of those
silkworms is the realization, in a small way, of our imagined
Paradise. (I am not considering the fact that a vast majority of
the worms are predestined to torment and the second death; for my
theme is of heaven, not of lost souls. I am speaking of the
elect--those worms preordained to salvation and rebirth.)
Probably they can feel only very weak sensations: they are
certainly incapable of prayer. But if they were able to pray,
they could not ask for anything more than they already receive
from the youth who feeds and tends them. He is their providence,
--a god of whose existence they can be aware in only the vaguest
possible way, but just such a god as they require. And we should
foolishly deem ourselves fortunate to be equally well cared-for
in proportion to our more complex wants. Do not our common forms
of prayer prove our desire for like attention? Is not the
assertion of our "need of divine love" an involuntary confession
that we wish to be treated like silkworms,--to live without pain
by the help of gods? Yet if the gods were to treat us as we want,
we should presently afford fresh evidence,--in the way of what is
called "the evidence from degeneration,"--that the great