ty
it has been the earliest obliterated. As soon as men felt the sense of
exultation to which the progress of their civilization and their
conquests in the material world gave birth, they repudiated the idea.
Religious philosophers springing up outside the revelation which was
held in trust by the chosen people took no account of the Fall; and,
indeed, how could that doctrine have been made to harmonize with the
dreams of Pantheism and emanation? By rejecting the notion of original
sin, and substituting the doctrine of emanation for that of creation,
most of the peoples of pagan antiquity were led to the melancholy theory
of the four ages, such as we find it in the Sacred Books of India and
the poetry of Hesiod. It was by the law of decadence and continual
deterioration that the ancient world believed itself so heavily laden.
In proportion as time passed and things departed further and further
from their point of emanation, they corrupt themselves and grow ever
worse. This is the effect of an inexorable fate and of the very force of
their development. In this fatal evolution towards decline, there is no
room left for human freedom; the whole revolves in a circle from which
there is no means of escaping. With Hesiod, each age marks a decadence
from the one that preceded it; and, as the poet explicitly declares
regarding the iron age inaugurated by heroes, each of these ages taken
separately follows the same descending scale as does their totality. In
India the conception of the four ages or _Yuga_, by developing itself
and producing its natural consequences, engenders that of the
_Manvantara_. According to this new theory the world, after having
accomplished its four ages of constant degeneration, undergoes
dissolution (_pralaya_), things having reached such a pitch of
corruption as to be no longer capable of subsisting. Then there springs
up a new universe, with a new humanity--doomed to the same cycle of
necessary and fatal evolution, which the four _Yugas_ in turn go
through, till a new dissolution takes place; and so on to infinity. Here
we have, indeed, fatalism under the most cruelly inexorable form, and
also the most destructive of all true morality. For there can be no
responsibility where there is no freedom, nor is there in reality any
good or evil where corruption is the effect of an irresistible law of
evolution.

How far more consolatory is the Biblical statement, hard though it first
appear to human pride,