FOREWORD
I am the child of the Centuries. I am the son of the Æons which were. I have always been, and I shall always be. To make me it has taken fire, star-dust, and the Spirit of God—the lives of billions of people, and the lights of a million suns.
I have grown from sun and star-dust to the Thing-Which-Thinks.
It were the basest ingratitude if I were not both thankful to God and proud of my pedigree.
What has come to me has been good; what shall come will be better: for I am Evolution, and I grow ever to greater things. Life has been good; death will be better; for it is the cause of all my past, making for a still greater future.
And this I know, not from Books nor from Knowledge, but from the unafraid, never silent voice of Instinct within me, which is God.
My debt to the past is great: I can never, in full, repay it; for they, my creditors, passed with it. They left me a world beautiful: shall I make it a world bare? They left a world bountiful: shall I leave it blazed and barren to the sands of death?
I am in debt to the Past. Shall the Future present the bill to find that I have gone to my grave a bankrupt? Find that I have wantonly laid waste the land, leaving no root of wild flower, no shade of tree, no spring that falleth from the hills?
Shall I destroy their trees for the little gain it may bring to my short Life-tenantry? Shall I make of their land a desert by day and a deluge by night? Shall I stamp with the degeneracy of gullies my own offspring, and scar with the red birth-mark of poverty the unborn of my own breed?
I live, charged with a great Goodness from the Past: I can die, paying it, only by a greater Kindness for the Future.