you here to the old heroes who
came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold,
that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply
after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they
wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.

And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have
we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if the
legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous
physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole
north of Asia be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and
age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea
further and further to the northward, and placing between it and the
Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying
animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and
the sun?

What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be
the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled
the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth
and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions,
reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown. Why
not? For so are all human destinies

Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God.

LECTURE V.
ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of the
human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological facts to
support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or impossible;
and that is, that man's mortal body and brain were derived from some
animal and ape-like creature. Of that I am not going to speak now. My
subject is--How this creature called man, from whatever source derived,
became civilised, rational, and moral. And I am sorry to say there is
tacked on by many to the first theory, another which does not follow from
it, and which has really nothing to do with it, and it is this--that man,
with all his wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet
always precious, at once his torment and his joy, his very hope of
everlasting life--that man, I say, developed himself, unassisted, out of
a state of primaeval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and
pain, by observing what actions would pay in the long run and what would
not; and