tive parents once did
when they disputed carcasses with the beasts of the forests.

It is this gloomy, savage force that has made the contemplative soul
of spiritual inquiry writhe under the startling contradictions of
history. When this force has been aroused with fear it has snarled and
roared defiance; when it has been enraged by opposition or the lash of
mastership it has cooled its ferocity in the blood of countless wars,
pillages and sacrifices; when satiated or pleased it has grunted with
pleasure or relaxed itself in orgies so gross and unspeakable that
modern history, with instinctive decency, has kept the story of them
veiled behind dead languages. This gloomy, savage force has always
been the same whether mastered or mastering. When some daring and
cunning genius of its own nature has cowed it, as the Alexanders,
Caesars and Napoleons have done, it has marched out to slaughter and be
slaughtered with a sullen pride in the daring that this mightier
ferocity has put upon it. When it has mastered its Drusus, its
Domitian, its Nero, its Vespasian and its Louis XVI, it has indulged
in wanton excesses of rage and destruction until, spent with
exhaustion, a new master has arisen to tie it up like a whipped dog.
It was this gloomy and savage force that crowded into the greatest
tribunal of all history, and yelled with discordant and frenzied rage
into the very face of the noblest and gentlest incarnation of
spiritual light that ever spent its brief moment on earth: "Crucify
_Him_! Release unto us Barabbas, _the Thief_." It was this savage
force, serving all masters with equal ferocious zeal, that Theodosius
turned against the Serapion at Alexandria, in the name of
Christianity, to blot out of existence the inestimable treasures of
knowledge and literature that had been accumulated by centuries of
labor.

At all times this gloomy force has been more wantonly cruel than wild
beasts. Man has been epigrammatically described as a reasoning animal,
a laughing animal, a constructive animal and even as "an animal that
gets drunk;" but the truest description is that he is the cruel and
rapacious animal. The greatest student of the jungle, who has written
of the beasts of the forest with the intuition of genius, has given us
this formula:

"Now this is the Law of the Jungle--as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall
break it must die: