It required countless ages for such a process; but the discoveries of geologists and astronomers—the earth-diggers and the star-gazers—combined to show that such countless ages not only might, but must, be assigned to the process. Our universe and our earth are by many millions of years older than men had thought.
But perhaps the chief fact of all, about this new discovery, is that it turned men's eyes forward, instead of backward. They began to look with a new hope towards the future of the race of men. Heretofore there had been an idea that the "Golden Age," when man was very good and very happy, lay somewhere in the remote past, and that present man had very much deteriorated. The new discovery showed him that he was, on the contrary, continually "evolving" into something higher, or, at the least, that, as he now is, he has evolved from something very much lower, even from the very lowest tiny atom that has any sort of life. It was an enlivening, hope-giving discovery.
But let us not ascribe to it, as some, at its first coming, almost certainly did, more than its due. It revealed to man the origin of his body; perhaps, but of less certainty, it showed him the origin of his mind. That it tells him anything of the origin of his spiritual self is really only asserted by those who virtually deny that he has any spiritual side at all in his nature. Or so, let me say to avoid dogmatic assertion, it seems to me that they deny it.
CHAPTER XVI
THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE
When Napoleon had been finally chained down, under the ward of the British Government, on the rock of St. Helena, the Emperors of Russia and Austria and the King of Prussia made a compact, which was called the Holy Alliance, with the principal and excellent object of maintaining peace. It is not easy to estimate how far it succeeded in that good aim, because we cannot be sure how many wars were checked by the existence of the alliance. Probably we ought to give it credit for some negative results of this kind which do not make any show in the story.
It had one curious effect, at all events. The Spanish settlements in South America had taken advantage of the distracted condition of Europe to declare their independence of the mother country. Spain appealed to the Holy Alliance to help her in regaining them, and the Alliance received the appeal favourably. But, before anything came of it, the United States put forward a famous declaration, known as the Monroe Doctrine, saying that they would not tolerate any interference, or any further colonisation, by any European Power, in either of the American Continents. Even so, Spain and the Holy Alliance might possibly have proceeded with their project had Great Britain favoured it. But Great Britain, on the contrary, was found to be not at all in its favour—for one thing her own experience in attempting to bring American colonists under a home Government which they disliked had not been encouraging—so the idea of putting pressure on the Spaniards in South America was at once and finally abandoned. It could not have been undertaken with any prospect of success if two nations so dominant at sea as Great Britain and the United States were opposed to it.
This Holy Alliance was formed between the three most powerful and most despotic rulers in Europe. Its essential idea was to maintain peace and order, but, as was evident from this very design of forcibly helping Spain to bring back her South American sheep into the home fold, it was peace and order according to the ideas of these despotic rulers. That is to say, that its ideals were in no accord with the spirit of freedom which had been let loose by the French Revolution, and was still working throughout the world, although for the moment it had lost some of its vitality because of the alarm excited by the extreme violence of that Revolution.