steady growth of scientific knowledge, proving that vast numbers of
phenomena which were once attributed to isolated and capricious acts of
spiritual intervention were regulated by invariable, inexorable,
all-pervasive law. Many of the formularies by which we still express our
religious beliefs date from periods when comets and eclipses were
believed to have been sent to portend calamity; when every great
meteorological change was attributed to some isolated spiritual agency;
when witchcraft and diabolical possession, supernatural diseases, and
supernatural cures were deemed indubitable facts: and when accounts of
contemporary miracles, Divine or Satanic, carried with them no sense of
strangeness or improbability. It is scarcely surprising that these
formularies sometimes seem incongruous with an age when the scientific
spirit has introduced very different conceptions of the government of
the universe, and when the miraculous, if it is not absolutely
discredited, is, at least in the eyes of most educated men, relegated to
a distant past.

The present century has seen some powerful reactions towards older
religious beliefs, but it has also been to an unusual extent fertile in
the kind of changes that most deeply affect them. Not many years have
passed since the whole drama of the world's history was believed to
have been comprised in the framework of 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise
Regained.' Man appeared in the universe a faultless being in a faultless
world, but he soon fell from his first estate, and his fall entailed
world-wide consequences. It introduced into our globe sin, death,
suffering, disease, imperfection and decay; all the mischievous and
ferocious instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the
multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that
makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were
accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth.
Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with
Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one
introduced the disease, the other provided the remedy.

It is idle to deny that the main outlines of this picture have been
wholly changed. First came the discovery that the existence of our globe
stretches far beyond the period once assigned to the Creation, and that
for countless ages before the time when Adam was believed to have lost
Paradise, death had been its most familiar fac