Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/191

Rh the mutilation of the Hermes, it is probable that all feel, though not perhaps responsible for the impiety, yet accountable for the moral recklessness and selfish audacity which caused the impiety. Athenian awelessness seemed almost the contradiction of Athenian superstition, but the Athenian mob felt in some dim way, we presume, that the cruel awelessness of the young scapegraces, and the cruel superstition which cried out for vengeance on them, were somehow a growth of the same stock. And to us, looking back at the history of Judaea and Athens, the real identity between the impiety of individual offenders, and the cruel vindictiveness which asked for vengeance on them as a mode of absolving the people from the consequences of such offences, seems plain enough. But as the history of a race develops, the time inevitably comes when finer distinctions are rendered necessary between sin and suffering, and when the notion of expiation is connected rather with the voluntary disinterestedness of more than human love, than with the compulsory suffering of arbitrarily chosen victims. The notion of sin is individualized, the range of the collective suffering which comes from it is better defined, and the conception of the intense and yet willing suffering which is its only adequate cure, comes out in its full grandeur in the doctrine of atoning love.

Thus, as Principal Tulloch truly urges, the history of the sense of sin is the truest example of the sort of "evolution" which should be our standard in interpreting the sense to be attached to lower kinds of evolution. In the first instance, the ideas of guilt, responsibility, punishment, expiation are all more or less confused in a vague notion of common evil, common penalty, and common hope of some sort of penance and purification. Then gradually the guilt is discriminated from the penalty, and the penalty from the expiation. It is seen that the doers of evil cannot suffer alone, but that they suffer differently, and in a much more permanent way, than those who only share the evil consequences and not the evil of the cause; and again, it is felt that those who only share involuntarily the evil consequences are in no way helping to remove the evil cause, while the divine love which accepts voluntarily, and for the sake of the guilty, that pain, of the origin of which it was. quite innocent, is restoring the moral order which the guilty broke. Now, can "evolution" of this sort be in any sense the mere growth of more organized out of less organized structures? Does not the whole story imply the conception of a divine horror of sin, and a more and more complete discrimination of its origin, its consequences, and its remedy, every step in which renders the divine ground-work of creation more evident? Surely Principal Tulloch is right in saying that the theistic and Christian conception of evolution excludes the idea of the growth of the higher forms of life out of the lower, and requires that of the gradual revelation of divine purposes which in the earlier stages of human life are only roughly and dimly discerned.

 

Sunday morning to Wednesday night, the north-west corner of Europe was in so much tumult of all kinds from the vagaries of the gases, liquids, and powdered solids which make up the envelope of our little planet, that only an earthquake, when the very foundations of things begin to tumble and collapse, could have created more alarm. No doubt an atmosphere is a most essential provision for human existence, and planets like the moon, which have none, are very desolate wastes indeed; but the vivacity which an atmosphere no doubt produces seems to be rather in excess of what is suitable to such creatures as we are, when rivers, in one place, are heaped up into water-spouts "to the height of a house,"—as the Rhine is stated to have been at Coblenz; when omnibus-drivers are beheaded by a wandering telegraph-wire in another; when, in a third place, farmers are entangled and starved to death in that fine white powder which is the only solid held by the atmosphere in reserve against human enterprise; when roofs of churches are swept into the windows of the neighbouring houses, and great blocks of stone are driven from the cliffs like so many hailstones, in other quarters; and when in some European capitals there is a hat and wig and chignon and umbrella storm quite as severe and much more grotesque than the rain and hailstorms with which it is mixed up; most of all, when in the great cities planted on the banks of rivers large suburbs are suddenly turned into lakes, and houses fall like children's playthings beneath the swirling tide. The snowstorm of Sunday and the tornado which lasted in fits till Wednesday morning were real lessons in what the apparently very 