sterious and mythical
denouement to this very age, and to those struggles of it which I
have herein attempted, clumsily enough, to sketch. We are entering
fast, I both hope and fear, into the region of prodigy, true and
false; and our great-grandchildren will look back on the latter half
of this century, and ask, if it were possible that such things could
happen in an organised planet? The Benthamites will receive this
announcement, if it ever meets their eyes, with shouts of laughter.
Be it so . . . nous verrons . . . In the year 1847, if they will
recollect, they were congratulating themselves on the nations having
grown too wise to go to war any more . . . and in 1848? So it has
been from the beginning. What did philosophers expect in 1792?
What did they see in 1793? Popery was to be eternal: but the
Reformation came nevertheless. Rome was to be eternal: but Alaric
came. Jerusalem was to be eternal: but Titus came. Gomorrha was
to be eternal, I doubt not; but the fire-floods came. . . . 'As it
was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of
Man. They were eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage;
and the flood came and swept them all away.' Of course they did not
expect it. They went on saying, 'Where is the promise of his
coming? For all things continue as they were from the beginning.'
Most true; but what if they were from the beginning--over a
volcano's mouth? What if the method whereon things have proceeded
since the creation were, as geology as well as history proclaims, a
cataclysmic method? What then? Why should not this age, as all
others like it have done, end in a cataclysm, and a prodigy, and a
mystery? And why should not my little book do likewise?

Again--Readers will probably complain of the fragmentary and
unconnected form of the book. Let them first be sure that that is
not an integral feature of the subject itself, and therefore the
very form the book should take. Do not young men think, speak, act,
just now, in this very incoherent, fragmentary way; without methodic
education or habits of thought; with the various stereotyped systems
which they have received by tradition, breaking up under them like
ice in a thaw; with a thousand facts and notions, which they know
not how to classify, pouring in on them like a flood?--a very Yeasty
state of mind altogether, like a mountain burn in a spring rain,
carrying down w