Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/31

Rh "Not a bit; if, in time, nobody is without a good working share of what intellect there is amongst us."

"No, not a bit! Enough of intellect for the good and happiness of mankind if we evolve no more of it. But this is another thing! This is a spiritual evolution, spiritual advance and develop ment a very different thing! Mark you, too, that it is not shown in a few amongst millions, but is common, general. And though, as you have said, it may perish at its beginnings, trampled out by war, the terrible war to come may absolutely confirm it. For my part, I don't despair of its surviving and spreading even from the battlefield. It is your own word that not only has the growth of common kindness been more urgent, rapid and general this last hundred years than was ever witnessed before in the whole long history of the world, but it has come out as strongly in making war as in making peace. It is seen in extending to foes a benevolence which not long ago would have been thought ludicrous and even unnatural. Why, then, if that's so, the feeling may be furthered and intensified by the very horrors of the next great war, such horrors as there must be; and God knows! God knows! but from this beginning the spiritual nature of man may be destined to rise as far above the rudimentary thing it is yet (I think of a staggering blind puppy) as King Solomon's wits were above an Eskimo's."

"Still the same enthusiast," I said to myself, "though with so great a difference." But what struck me most was the reverence with which he said "God knows!" For the coolest Encyclopedist could not have denied the existence of God with a more settled air than did "the Vernet of old days."

"And yet," so he went on, "were the human race to become all-righteous in a fortnight, and to push out angels' wings from its shoulders, every one! every one! all together on Christmas Day, Rh