"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."—Genesis i. 28.
Man has ceased from believing in miracles, because he is convinced that the divine power of the miracle-worker has departed from him. At last he has proclaimed the age of wonders to be at an end, because he no longer knows himself capable of working wonders.
He acknowledges that miracles are still needed. He hears the distressing cry for the super-natural everywhere. All about him to-day he feels that wonders will have to be worked if the value of Life, of his fellows, and of himself is to be raised, by however little; and yet he halts like one paralyzed before the task he can no longer accomplish, and finding that his hand has lost its cunning and that his eye has lost its authority, he stammers helplessly that the age of miracles has gone by.
Everything convinces him of the fact. Everybody, from his priest to his porter, from his wife to his astrologer, from his child to his neighbour, tells him plainly that he is no longer divine, no longer a god, no longer even a king!
Not only has the age of miracles gone by; but with it, also, has vanished that age in which man could conceive of god in his own image. There are no gods now; because man himself has long since doubted that man is godlike.
Soon there will be no kings,[2] finally there will be no greatness at all, and this will mean the evanescence of man himself.
To speak of all this as the advance of knowledge, as the march of progress, as the triumph of science, and as the glories of enlightenment, is merely to deck a corpse, to grease-paint a sore, and to pour rose-water over a cesspool.
If the triumph of science mean "The Descent of Man"; if the glories of enlightenment mean, again, the descent of man; and if progress imply, once more, the descent of man; then the question to be asked is: in whose hands have science, enlightenment and the care of progress fallen?
This world is here for us to make of it what we will. It is a field of yielding clay, in which, like sandboys, we can build our castles and revel in our creations.
But what are these people doing? In building their castles they grow ever more like beavers, and ants, and beetles. In laying out their gardens they grow ever more like slugs, and worms, and centipedes. And their joy seems to be to feel themselves small and despised.