Page:The inequality of human races (1915).djvu/24

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES pondered these two truths, we shall find no further help, I repeat, in the wisdom of the ancients.

That wisdom tells us nothing definite as to the ways in which the Divine will moves in order to compass the death of peoples ; it is, on the contrary, driven to consider these ways as essentially mysterious. It is seized with a pious terror at the sight of ruins, and admits too easily that the fallen peoples could not have been thus shaken, struck down, and hurled into the gulf, except by the aid of miracles. I can readily believe that certain events have had a miraculous element, so far as this is stated by Scripture ; but where, as is usually the case, the formal testimony of Scripture is wanting, we may legitimately hold the ancient opinion to be incomplete and unenlightened. We may, in fact, take the opposite view, and recognize that the heavy hand of God is laid without ceasing on our societies, as the effect of a decision pronounced before the rise of the first people ; and that the blow falls according to rule and foreknowledge, by virtue of fixed edicts, inscribed in the code of the universe by the side of other laws which, in their rigid severity, govern organic and inorganic nature alike.

We may justly reproach the philosophy of the early sacred writers with a lack of experience ; and so, we may say, they explain a mystery merely by enunciating a theological truth which, however certain, is itself another mystery. They have not pushed their inquiries so far as to observe the facts of the natural world. But at least one cannot accuse them of misunderstanding the greatness of the problem and scratching for solutions at the surface of the ground. In fact, they have been content to state the question in lofty language ; and if they have not solved it, or even thrown light upon it, at least they have not made it a breeder of errors. This puts them far above the rationalistic schools and all their works.

The great minds of Athens and Rome formulated the theory, accepted by later ages, that States, civilizations, and peoples, are destroyed only by luxury, effeminacy, misgovernment, fanaticism, and the corruption of morals. These causes, taken