ciety, or even relieve the individual
pessimism and despair of men like Seneca, Pliny, or Marcus Aurelius.
Lucretius, wholly or partially insane, died by his own hand. The light
of philosophy left the Roman Empire, as Uhlhorn and others have clearly
shown, under the shadow of a general despair. And it was in the midst of
that gloom that the light of Christianity shone forth. Augustine, who
had fathomed various systems and believed in them, tells us that it was
the philosophy which appeared in the writings and in the life of the
Apostle Paul which finally wrought the great change in his career. Plato
had done much; Paul and the Cross of Christ did infinitely more.

The development of higher forms of life from lower by natural selection,
as set forth by the late Charles Darwin, has been supposed to be an
entirely new system. Yet the Chinese claim to have held a theory of
development which represents the mountains as having once been covered
by the sea. When the waters subsided small herbs sprang up, which in the
course of ages developed into trees. Worms and insects also appeared
spontaneously, like lice upon a living body; and these after a long
period became larger animals--beetles became tortoises; worms, serpents.
The mantis was developed into an ape, and certain apes became at length
hairless. One of these by accident struck fire with a flint. The
cooking of food at length followed the use of fire, and the apes, by
being better nourished, were finally changed into men. Whether this
theory is ancient or modern, it is eminently Chinese, and it shows the
natural tendency of men to ascribe the germs of life to spontaneous
generation, because they fail to see the Great First Cause who produces
them. The one thing which is noticeable in nearly all human systems of
religion and philosophy, is that they have no clear and distinct idea of
creatorship. They are systems of evolution; in one way or another they
represent the world as having _grown_. Generally they assume the
eternity of matter, and often they are found to regard the present
cosmos as only a certain stage in an endless circle of changes from life
to death and from death to life. The world rebuilds itself from the
wreck and debris of former worlds. It is quite consistent with many of
these systems that there should be gods, but as a rule they recognize no
God. While all races of men have shown traces of a belief in a Supreme
Creator and Ruler far above their inferi