Colony

[Illustration: (signed) Cordially Yours B. Orange Flower]

THE ARENA.

No. XIX.

JUNE, 1891.

THE NEW COLUMBUS.

BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE.

History repeats itself, but on new planes. Often, a symbol appears in
one age, and the spirit of which it is the expression is revealed in
another. Each answers the need of its own time. From the creative
standpoint, which is out of time, spirit and symbol are one; but to us,
who see things successively, they seem as prior and posterior.

If this be so, it should be possible for a thoughtful and believing mind
in some measure to forecast the future from the record of the past. No
doubt, past and present contain the germs of all that is to be, were the
analyst omniscient. But it needs not omniscience roughly to body-forth
the contours of coming events. It is done daily, on a smaller or larger
scale, with more or less plausibility. All theories are grounded in this
principle. And it is noticeable that, at this moment, such tentative
prophesies are more than frequent, and more comprehensive than usual in
their scope.

The condition of mankind, during the last quarter of the fifteenth
century, bore some curious analogies to its state at present. A certain
stage or epoch of human life seemed to have run its course and come to a
stop. The impulses which had started it were exhausted. In the political
field, feudalism, originally beneficent, had become tyrannous and
stifling; and monarchy, at first an austere necessity, had grown to be,
beyond measure, arrogant, selfish, and luxurious. In science, the old
methods had proved themselves puerile and inefficient, and the leading
scientists were magicians and witches; in literature, no poet had arisen
worthy to strike the lyre that Chaucer tuned to music. As for religion,
the corruptions of the papacy, and the corresponding degradation of the
monasteries and of the priesthood generally, had brought it down from a
region of sublime and self-abnegating faith, to a commodity for raising
money, and a cloak to hide profligacy. Martin Luther was still in the
womb of the future; and so were Shakespeare, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes,
and Oliver Cromwell. Pessimists were declaring, according to their
invariable custom, that what was bad would get worse, and that what was
good would disappear. But there were, scattered here and there
throughout Christendom, a number of men of the profounder, optimistic
tendency, who saw i