ogs' dancing master." Harvey,
who discovered the circulation of the blood, was ridiculed and persecuted
by his professional brethren on account of his heresy and driven from his
lecture chair. When Stephenson invented his locomotive engine, European
mathematicians of the time, instead of opening their eyes and studying the
facts, continued for years to prove to their own satisfaction that an
engine on smooth rails could never pull a load, as the wheels would simply
slip round and round and the train make no progress. To examples like
these one might add indefinitely, both from ancient and modern history,
and even from our own times. Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, had
to battle for his wonderful international language against the same sort
of ridicule, contempt, and stupid opposition which greeted Columbus,
Galvani, and Stephenson. Even Esperanto, which was given to the world so
recently as 1887, has had its martyrs.

The Dawn of Reconciliation

In the last half century or so, however, a change has come over the spirit
of the times, a New Light of Truth has arisen which has already made the
controversies of last century seem strangely out of date. Where are now
the boastful materialists and dogmatic atheists who, only a few short
years ago, were threatening to drive religion out of the world? And where
are the preachers who so confidently consigned those who did not accept
their dogmas to the fires of hell and the tortures of the damned? Echoes
of their clamor we may still hear, but their day is fast declining and
their doctrines are being discredited. We can see now that the doctrines
around which their controversies waxed most bitter were neither true
science nor true religion. What scientist in the light of modern psychical
research could still maintain that "brain secretes thought as the liver
secretes bile"? Or that decay of the body is necessarily accompanied by
decay of the soul? We now see that thought to be really free must soar to
the realms of psychical and spiritual phenomena and not be confined to the
material only. We realize that what we now know about nature is but as a
drop in the ocean compared with what remains to be discovered. We
therefore freely admit the possibility of miracles, not indeed in the
sense of the breaking of nature's laws, but as manifestations of the
operation of subtle forces which are still unknown to us, as electricity
and X rays were to our ancestors. On the othe