HEN Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth the forest, he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performances And Zarathustra spake thus unto the people: I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock, a thing of shame › And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants? Lo, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! * * * * * * But ye, also, my brethren, tell me: What doth your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency? Verily, a polluted stream is man. One The hour when ye say: "What good is my reason! Doth it long for knowledge as the lion for his food? It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!" The hour when ye say: What good is my virtue! As yet it hath not made me passionate. How weary I am of my good and my bad! It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!" The hour when ye say: "What good is my justice! I do not see that I am fervor and fuel. The just, however, are fervor and fuel! ” The hour when we say: "What good is my pity! Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loveth man? But my pity is not a crucifixion.” Have ye ever spoken thus? Have ye ever cried thus? Ah! would that I had heard you crying thus! It is not your sin-it is your self-satisfaction that crieth unto heaven; your very sparingness in sin crieth unto heaven! ›☛ o Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which ye should be inoculated? Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!— When Zarathustra had thus spoken, one of the people called out: "We have heard enough of the rope-dancer; it is time now for us to see him!” And all the people laughed at Zarathustra. But the rope-dancer, who thought the words applied to him, began his performance. -Friedrich Nietzsche. must be a sea, to receive a polluted I stream without becoming impure. Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that sea; in him can your great contempt be submerged 0 30 What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue. The hour when ye say: "What good is my happiness! It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself! VIEW a return to the dornination of Britain with horror, and would risk all for independence; but that point ceded, I would give them advantageous commercial terms. The destruction of Old England would hurt me; I wish it well, it afforded my ancestors an asylum from persecution.-John Jay. The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.-W. S. Landor. HIS century, which some have called an age of iron, has been also an age of ideas, an era of seeking and finding the like of which was never known before. It is an epoch the grandeur of which dwarfs all others that can be named since the beginning of the historic period, if not since. Man first became distinctively human. In their mental habits, in their methods of inquiry, and in the data at their command, "the men of the present day who have fully kept pace with the scientific movement In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: we have just passed in review, the gaps So twice five miles of fertile ground sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense- And here were forests ancient as the hills, Down the green hill athwart a cedarn A savage place! as holy and enchanted haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! As if this Earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever As an inevitable result of the thronging discoveries just enumerated, we find ourselves in the midst of a mighty revolution in human thought. Time-honored creeds are losing their hold upon men; ancient symbols are shorn of their value; everything is called in question. The controversies of the day are not like those of former times. It is no longer a struggle between abstruse dogmas of rival churches. Religion itself is called upon to show why it should any longer claim our allegiance. It flung up momently the sacred river. (Concluded on next page) great-grandfathers. It is characteristic of this higher plane of development that the progress which until lately was so slow must henceforth be rapid. Men's minds are becoming more flexible, the resistance to innovation is weakening, and our intellectual demands are multiplying while the means of satisfying them are increasing. Vast as are the achievements There are those who deny the existence of God There are those who would explain away the human soul as a mere No religious creed that man has ever devised can be made to harmonize in all its features withmodern knowledge All such creeds were constructed with reference to theories of the universe which are now utterly and hopelessly discredited. How, then, it is asked, amid the general wreck of old beliefs, can we hope that the religious attitude in which from time immemorial we have been wont to contemplate the universe can any longer be maintained? Is not the belief in God perhaps a dream of the childhood of our race, like the belief in elves and bogarts which once was no less universal? and is not modern science fast destroying the one have the strongest possible reason for believing that the idea is permanent and answers to an Eternal Reality. It was to be expected that conceptions of Deity handed down from primitive men should undergo serious modification. If it can be shown that the essential element in Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: The shadow of the dome of pleasure It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: And on her dulcimer she played, To such a deep delight 't would win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, Weave a circle round him thrice, as it has already destroyed the other? Such are the questions which we daily hear asked, sometimes with flippant eagerness, but oftener with anxious dread. . . . . If we find in that idea, as conceived by untaught thinkers in the twilight of antiquity, an element that still survives the widest and deepest generalizations of modern times, we To say that two is company and three is a crowd is to make a very temporary statement. After a short time satiety or use and wont has crept sunderingly between the two, and, if they are any company at all, they are bad company, who pray discreetly but passionately for the crowd that is censured by the proverb. -James Stephens. Our whole life is like a play.-Ben Jonson. FTER having applied my mind with more than ordinary attention to my studies, it is my usual custom to relax and unbend it in the conversation of such as are rather easy than shining companions. This I find particularly necessary for me before I retire to rest, in order to draw my slumbers upon me by degrees and fall asleep insensibly. This is the particular use I make of a set of heavy honest men with whom I have passed many hours with much indolence though not with great pleasure Their conversation is a kind of preparative for sleep; it takes the mind from its abstractions, leads it into the familiar traces of thought, and lulls it into that state of tranquillity which is the condition of a thinking man when he is but half-awake.. I must own it makes me very melancholy in company when I hear a young man begin a story, and have often observed that one of a quarter of an hour long, in a man of five-and-twenty, gathers circumstances every time he tells it, until it grows into a long Canterbury tale of two hours by the time he is three score. The only way of avoiding such a trifling and frivolous old age is to lay up in our way to it such stores of knowledge and observation as may make us useful and agreeable in our declining years. The mind of man in a long life will become a magazine of wisdom or folly, and will consequently discharge itself in something impertinent or improving which reason, as there is nothing more ridiculous than an old trifling storyteller, so there is nothing more venerable than one who has turned his experience to the entertainment and advantage of mankind do For HAT a man in his sixties should be able to write a series of works so robust, so fresh, so real, as those which Defoe, at that age, gave to the world is certainly a fact unequaled in the history of our literature. Among those works are Robinson Crusoe, the immortal; Colonel Jack, equally immortal; Moll Flanders; Roxana; and the Journal of the Plague Year Here are five works, every one of which is enough by itself to make the reputation of an author; five works, one of which is read by every boy of all those who speak our English tongue, while the rest, for the student of literature, are as immortal as Robinson Crusoe himself It is as if the writer laughed at time, or as if he would crowd into the last ten years of his life he died at seventy-all the work which most men are contented to spread over their whole working time; or as if he would prove that even in old age he could recover the spring and flower of youth, could feel again the force of love, and be moved once more with the ambitions, the passions, the heats, the agitations-in a word, with all the emotion of youth. Old age, for the most part, regards not the things of youth; it is the saddest thing to see theold man turning unmoved from the things which mean so much, so very much, to his grandsons. There is a senile callousness which is lamentable to witness; there is a sorrowful loosening of the hold with which the world has hitherto gripped the soul. With Defoe there is nothing of all this, absolutely nothing; he writes, save for his balanced style, as a young man of five-andtwenty.-Walter Besant. OTHING is more unjust than to cast especial blame for resistance to science upon the Roman Church. The Protestant Church, though rarely able to be so severe, has been more blameworthy. The persecution of Galileo and his compeers by the older church was mainly at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the persecution of Robertson Smith, and Winchell, and Woodrow, and Toy, and the young professors at Beyrout, by various Protestant authorities, was near the end of the nineteenth century. Those earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly in accordance with principles held at that time by all religionists, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world; these later persecutions by Protestants were in defiance of principles which all Protestants today hold or pretend to hold, and none make louder claim to hold them than the very sects which persecuted these eminent Christian men of our day, whose crime was that they were intelligent enough to accept the science of their time, and honest enough to acknowledge it. Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for excluding knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while real knowledge of geological and biological and anthropological truth is denied or pitifully diluted in so many American Protestant colleges and universities in the nineteenth century. Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to the Catholic Index and to lay stress on the fact that nearly every really important book in the last three centuries has been forbidden by it, so long as young men in so many American Protestant universities and colleges are nursed with "ecclesiastical pap rather than with real thought, and directed to the works of " solemnly constituted impostors," or to sundry approved courses of reading," while they are studiously kept aloof from such leaders in modern thought as Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Draper and Lecky... As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault. Protestant as well as Catholic. It was not the fault of religion; it was the fault of that shortsighted linking of theological dogmas to scriptural texts which, in utter defiance of the words and works of the Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded, loudvoiced men are ever prone to substitute for religion. Justly it is said by one of the most eminent among contemporary Anglican divines that "it is because they have mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so often been foes of light."—Andrew D. White. EARNED men in all ages have had their judgments free, and most commonly disagreeing from the common judgment of the world; such also have they published both with pen and tongue; notwithstanding, they themselves have lived in the common society with others, and have borne patiently with errors and imperfections which they could not amend. Plato, the philosopher, wrote his book on the commonwealth, in which he condemned many things that then were maintained in the world, and required many things to have been reformed; and yet, notwithstanding, he lived under such policies as then were universally received, without further troubling of any state. Even so, madam, am I content to do, in uprightness of heart, and with a testimony of a good conscience. -John Knox to Mary, Queen of Scots. |