ison, superior
and inferior upon countless scores. It has become apparent that whole
masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon
the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or
trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their
characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the
civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and
demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their
level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.
The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenth
century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, have
bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist has
shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism is
a thing of the past, it is no longer a doctrine, but a faction. There
must follow some newborn thing.

And as effectually has the mass of criticism that centres about Darwin
destroyed the dogma of the Fall upon which the whole intellectual fabric
of Christianity rests. For without a Fall there is no redemption, and
the whole theory and meaning of the Pauline system is vain. In
conjunction with the wide vistas opened by geological and astronomical
discovery, the nineteenth century has indeed lost the very habit of
thought from which the belief in a Fall arose. It is as if a hand had
been put upon the head of the thoughtful man and had turned his eyes
about from the past to the future. In matters of intelligence, at least,
if not yet in matters of ethics and conduct, this turning round has
occurred. In the past thought was legal in its spirit, it deduced the
present from pre-existing prescription, it derived everything from the
offences and promises of the dead; the idea of a universe of expiation
was the most natural theory amidst such processes. The purpose the
older theologians saw in the world was no more than the
revenge--accentuated by the special treatment of a favoured minority--of
a mysteriously incompetent Deity exasperated by an unsatisfactory
creation. But modern thought is altogether too constructive and creative
to tolerate such a conception, and in the vaster past that has opened to
us, it can find neither offence nor promise, only a spacious scheme of
events, opening out--perpetually opening out--with a quality of final
purpose as irresistible to most men's minds as it is incompre