ine of Election should be even of a deeper
and wider application than divines have been wont to think? What if
individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for a
special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, and the
salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn, abused that
divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers,
of the less enlightened? To increase the inequalities of nature by their
own selfishness, instead of decreasing them, into the equality of grace,
by their own self-sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and
even more right than we were taught to think?

So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me still
worth listening to, in this enlightened 19th century, I will go on.

At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-known
history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward
and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray you, that the
three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China,
Hindostan. The first glimpses of the world are always like those which
the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives
us. As it was 400 years ago in America, so it was in North Africa and in
Asia 4,000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught I know. Nay, if anyone should
ask--And why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk
beneath the Tropic sea? I for one have no rejoinder save--We have no
proofs as yet.

There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim dawn of
history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans--colossal
monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds; with
aristocracies, priesthoods--seemingly always of a superior and conquering
race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed of
older conquered races; of imported slaves, too, and their descendants.

But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood? You
enquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves. They are
usually--I had almost dared to say, always--foreigners. They have
crossed the neighbouring mountains. They have come by sea, like Dido to
Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Bello to America, and they have
sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer,
than the aborigines. They are to them--as Jacques Cartier was