Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/32

24 it would still be the Darwinian process. Yes, we must stick to it, that it is evolution, I suppose, and I'm sure it contents me well enough. What matter for the process! And yet do you know what I think?"

Lights had now been brought in by the waiter—a waiter who really could not understand why not. But we sat by the open window looking out upon the deepening darkness of the garden, beyond which the river shone as if by some pale effulgence of its own, or perhaps by a little store of light saved up from the liberal sunshine of the day.

"Do you know what I think?" said Vernet, with the look of a man who is about to confess a weakness of which he is ashamed. "I sometimes think that if I were of the orthodox I should draw an argument for supernatural religion, against your strict materialists, from this sudden change of heart in Christian countries. For that is what it is. It is a change of heart; or, if you like to have it so, of spirit; and the remarkable thing is that it is nothing else. Whether it lasts or not, this awakening of brotherliness cannot be completely understood unless that is understood. What else has changed, these hundred years? There is no fresh discovery of human suffering, no new knowledge of the desperate poverty and toil of so many of our fellow-creatures: nor can we see better with our eyes, or understand better what we hear and see. This that we are talking about is a heart-growth, which, as we know, can make the lowliest peasant divine; not a mind-growth, which can be splendid in the coldest and most devilish man. Well, then, were I of the orthodox I should say this. When, after many generations, I see a traceless movement of the spirit of man like the one we are speaking of—a movement which, if it gains in strength and goes on to its natural end, will transfigure human society and make it infinitely more like heaven—I think the Rh