e you are quite identical. As for you,
sir, who also laugh, let some man come and strike you in the
face whilst you are enjoying that marvellous-looking dish, and
we shall soon see how much of the savage there is in _you_.

There, I might go on for ever, but what is the good? Civilization
is only savagery silver-gilt. A vainglory is it, and like a
northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.
Out of the soil of barbarism it has grown like a tree, and,
as I believe, into the soil like a tree it will once more, sooner
or later, fall again, as the Egyptian civilization fell, as the
Hellenic civilization fell, and as the Roman civilization and
many others of which the world has now lost count, fell also.
Do not let me, however, be understood as decrying our modern
institutions, representing as they do the gathered experience
of humanity applied for the good of all. Of course they have
great advantages -- hospitals for instance; but then, remember,
we breed the sickly people who fill them. In a savage land they
do not exist. Besides, the question will arise: How many of
these blessings are due to Christianity as distinct from civilization?
And so the balance sways and the story runs -- here a gain,
there a loss, and Nature's great average struck across the two,
whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty
equation in which the result will equal the unknown quantity
of her purpose.

I make no apology for this digression, especially as this is
an introduction which all young people and those who never like
to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip. It seems
to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand
the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried
away by the pride of knowledge. Man's cleverness is almost indefinite,
and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like
an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish
it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby
you will make it bulge out the other, but you will _never_, while
the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.
It is the one fixed unchangeable thing -- fixed as the stars,
more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of
the Eternal. Human nature is God's kaleidoscope, and the little
bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears,
joys, aspirations towards good and evil and what not, a