the universe. But to any one
whose mind is pervaded by faith in God, a non-ethical universe in
conflict with the incomprehensibly ethical soul of the Agnostic, is as
incredible as a black horned devil, an active material anti-god with
hoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan-scorched nose complete. To believe
completely in God is to believe in the final rightness of all being. The
ethical system that condemns the ways of life as wrong, or points to the
ways of death as right, that countenances what the scheme of things
condemns, and condemns the general purpose in things as it is now
revealed to us, must prepare to follow the theological edifice upon
which it was originally based. If the universe is non-ethical by our
present standards, we must reconsider these standards and reconstruct
our ethics. To hesitate to do so, however severe the conflict with old
habits and traditions and sentiments may be, is to fall short of faith.

Now, so far as the intellectual life of the world goes, this present
time is essentially the opening phase of a period of ethical
reconstruction, a reconstruction of which the New Republic will possess
the matured result. Throughout the nineteenth century there has been
such a shattering and recasting of fundamental ideas, of the
preliminaries to ethical propositions, as the world has never seen
before. This breaking down and routing out of almost all the cardinal
assumptions on which the minds of the Eighteenth Century dwelt securely,
is a process akin to, but independent of, the development of mechanism,
whose consequences we have traced. It is a part of that process of
vigorous and fearless criticism which is the reality of science, and of
which the development of mechanism and all that revolution in physical
and social conditions we have been tracing, is merely the vast imposing
material bye product. At present, indeed, its more obvious aspect on the
moral and ethical side is destruction, any one can see the chips flying,
but it still demands a certain faith and patience to see the form that
ensues. But it is not destruction, any more than a sculptor's work is
stone-breaking.

The first chapter in the history of this intellectual development, its
definite and formal opening, coincides with the opening of the
nineteenth century and the publication of Malthus's _Essay on
Population_. Malthus is one of those cardinal figures in intellectual
history who state definitely for all time, things apparent