of salvation are persecuted by
a sort of unconscious ingratitude, which is the fruit of spiritual
darkness.

What was the argument of Christopher Columbus? He thought: "If the
earth is really round, he who starts from a certain point and advances
steadily, will return to the point of departure." This was the _sum_
of the intellectual work which enriched mankind with a new world.

That a great continent should have lain in the track of Columbus, and
that he should have encountered this and not death, was the destiny
due to the chance of environment. The environment sometimes rewards
"small reasonings" of this kind in a surprising manner.

It was certainly not a great labor of human intelligence which brought
about these great results; it was the triumph of this idea over the
whole consciousness, and the heroic courage of the man, which gave it
its value. The great difficulty, for the man who had conceived the
idea, was to persevere until he could persuade others to help him in
his enterprise, to give him ships and followers. It was the _faith_
and not the _idea_ of Columbus which triumphed.

That simple and logical reasoning kindled within him something
infinitely more precious than intelligence, and enabled a single man
of humble origin, and almost uneducated, to present a world to a
queen.

We are told that Alessandro Volta's wife was ill with fever, and that
he, in accordance with the practise of his day, was preparing the
usual febrifuge, a broth of skinned frogs; it was a rainy day, and
when he hung up the dead frogs on the iron bar of the window, he
noticed that their legs contracted. "If dead muscles contract, it must
mean that some external force has penetrated them." This was the
simple argument of the "genius," the "great discoverer." And seeking
this force, Volta, by means of his piles, was able to wrest from the
earth electricity, which is, literally as well as figuratively, the
"gleam" of an immense progress. Laying due weight upon a little fact,
such as that of a dead being having moved, considering it soberly
without any fanciful additions, and fixing the mind upon the resulting
problem: Why does it move?--such was the lengthy process by which one
of the greatest conquests of civilization was achieved.

Akin to this was Galileo's discovery, when, standing in Pisa
Cathedral, he watched the oscillations of a hanging lamp. He observed
that the oscillations were all completed in the same space of time,