things are
unendurable. If we were a race of poets we would make an end of them
before the end of this miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs
instead, we think them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and
allow them to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there
were no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of it
would be utter destruction.

Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The mysterious
thing we call life organizes itself into all living shapes, bird, beast,
beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel in cunning dwarfs and
in laborious muscular giants, capable, these last, of enduring
toil, willing to buy love and life, not with suicidal curses and
renunciations, but with patient manual drudgery in the service of higher
powers. And these higher powers are called into existence by the same
self-organization of life still more wonderfully into rare persons who
may by comparison be called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose
aims extend far beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites
and personal affections, since they perceive that it is only by the
establishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral faith
that the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this order to be
set up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since these thoughtless
ones pursue only their narrower personal ends and can by no means
understand the aims of a god? Godhead, face to face with Stupidity, must
compromise. Unable to enforce on the world the pure law of thought, it
must resort to a mechanical law of commandments to be enforced by
brute punishments and the destruction of the disobedient. And however
carefully these laws are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the
framers at the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed
that thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life;
and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought. Yet if
the high givers of that law themselves set the example of breaking
it before it is a week old, they destroy all its authority with their
subjects, and so break the weapon they have forged to rule them for
their own good. They must therefore maintain at all costs the sanctity
of the law, even when it has ceased to represent their thought; so that
at last they get entangled in a network of ordinances which they no
longer believe in, and yet have made so sacred