ings corresponds very accurately to the esoteric teachings on the subject. But what of that? The older dogmas of the Trinity or the Atonement have been vaguely or crudely understood of the many. Faith is fortunately not dependent on the power of grasping intellectually the finer subtleties either of metaphysical or of scientific thought. Like all great truths, the doctrine of evolution has been widely fruitful. From its original application to matters biological it has spread to this region and to that until it has become, as the cardinal tenets of a living faith must always become, the central principle of all human thought and activity. It has rewritten our history; it has transformed our theories of society and politics; it has revolutionized literary criticism. Our sophists and modern schoolmen find in this doctrine both source and criticism for all distinctions of right and wrong. The tables of stone have been exchanged for the shifting sands of a 'pragmatic' sanction. One wonders whether, some centuries hence, when our present-day religion shall have faded and the inexpugnable faith of mankind shall have transferred itself to newer dogmas, one wonders whether the historian of that future age may not laugh at us for our evolution-madness, as we laugh to-day at the spiritual allegorizings with which the medieval mind interpreted all nature and all art.

This modern religion of the scientific spirit demands and wins our assent not only to its speculative dogmas in the realm of cosmogony and metaphysics; it touches our daily life and issues in a new ethic. To its vita contemplativa it adds a vita activa. There is a heaven to be won by right living, and a hell to terrify the erring; a heaven of health and efficiency, a hell of disease and failure. Our life is girt about by a myriad of unseen essences, malignant and

beneficent, demons and ministers of grace. That these essences are called bacteria rather than spirits is but an unimportant difference in terminology.

Poor Tom cowered before Frateretto and Smulkin and Hopdance; the foul fiends of to-day are the various schizomycetes and trypanosomes of disease, with names as uncouth as any in the old demonology. The first petition and the last of our modern pater noster is, 'Deliver us from infection.' Our charms and exorcisms are antitoxins and disinfectants. We have our ceremonial washings. We bind our brows with prophylacteries. Our incense we have renamed fumigation, with some loss the while in its sweet savor. Our confessions are made to the family doctor. Full and without reserve they must be, if his shriving is to avail. His kind but searching questions bring home to us the conviction of sin in matters where our blindness had recognized no wrong. We are bidden to forsake our evil ways with true penitence. But penitence is not enough: the wise confessor imposes also a fitting penance the austere fasting of his dietary, the abstention for a season from pleasures and distractions ordinarily innocent. If our sin is very grievous, he may even relegate us to retreat in the wilderness, or to the rigorous observances of a sanitarium.

The firm belief of the people in the very existence of the disease-germ is a touching instance of the power of faith. Which of us has seen the germ of tuberculosis at any time? Certain holy men in our laboratories declare that they have seen it through the eye of the microscope, as holy men of old reported their visions of devils and of angels. We accept the reports of our seers as did our fathers in the so-called 'Age of Faith.' Woe to us if through skepticism or callous indifference we neglect the ceremonial purifications

which they have established. If my house has been possessed by the foul devils of scarlet fever, it is at peril of active persecution by the law that I fail to burn my sulphur incense. By force of public opinion, and by law as well, I should be compelled, did not my abounding faith lead me of my own accord to purchase indulgence against the purgatorial pains of the smallpox through the rite of vaccination. The penance imposed is but the discomfort of a sore arm and some pence paid to the ministrant.

Faith is ever near akin to superstition; and in this modern Age of Faith, as in the medieval, there are discredited hangers-on of the hierarchy, or it may be quack priests, who are ready, like the pardoners of the later Middle Ages, to coin human credulity to their own profit by the sale of lying absolution and indulgence. What else are the countless tonics and elixirs, the blood-purifiers and pain-killers and liver-pills which fill the newspapers and crowd the hoardings with their strident capitals? Every new revelation of the faith becomes a cure-all for the credulous and has its passing vogue. Liquid air and the X-ray have already lost their therapeutic prestige before the mysterious properties of magic radium.

For these abuses of the faith the hierarchs and true priesthood of science are not, of course, responsible. The established and recognized ritual of purification they indeed support, but with the clear recognition which has always accompanied true holiness and pure religion that outward forms and ceremonies, although useful as means of grace, are comparatively idle unless with them there go a right inward state.

Here is the more spiritual teaching of salvation as set forth in a recent book by one of the high priests of the

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science of bacteriology, Professor E. Ray Lankester:

'For a long time the ideal of hygienists has been to preserve man from all contact with the germs of infection, to destroy them and destroy the animals conveying them, such as rats, mosquitoes, and other flies. But it has been borne in upon us, that useful as such attempts are, and great as is the improvement in human conditions which can be thus effected, yet we cannot hope for any really complete or satisfactory realization of the ideal of escape from contact with infective germs. The task is beyond human powers. The conviction has now been arrived at that, whilst we must take every precaution to diminish infection, yet our ultimate safety must come from within- namely, from the activity, the trained, stimulated, and carefully guarded activity of those wonderful colorless amoeba-like corpuscles, whose use was so long unrecognized, named "phagocytes."

The millenium, when Satan and his host shall be bound, is a fair and noble ideal, but the task of its accomplishment is 'beyond human powers.' It is well to make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but the kingdom of health is within us, and our salvation is nearer to us than we believed. The gracious phagocytes are of our very tissues and blood; while we slumber they watch for our safety, and war continually against the devil and his infecting angels, if we will but cherish their activity within us. Our prayer to science must be not only, 'Lead us not into infection,' but, 'Create new phagocytes within us.'

In Dr. Lankester's book there is a picture of a phagocyte slaying a disease-germ. It is hardly so inspiring as the old picture of St. George and the dragon; but, I need not say, my faith accepts the phagocyte unquestioningly

and entertains considerable doubt as to the historicity of St. George's great adventure. My forefathers of the Middle Ages, having heard no word of St. Phagocytus, believed as firmly in St. George and in his archangelic prototype. Did they not read of him and see him pictured in their books, even as St. Phagocytus is portrayed to me in mine?

I trust that the reader, if he has borne with me thus far, does not suppose that I am seeking presumptuously to discredit the revealed truth of modern science. Not at all. Like him, like all my fellows, I believe that on the lip of a common drinking-cup disease-germs lie thicker than the autumnal leaves of Vallombrosa, as thick as the angels whom the medieval schoolman saw crowded on the point of a needle. I avoid the common drinkingcup, and shun all infection where I can. When it cannot be shunned, and that must happen daily, nay, hourly, I put my faith in my phagocytes and play the man, fearing not overmuch the pestilence that walketh in darkness or the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday. I believe, and my belief issues in conduct. I am merely maintaining that my belief, and that of most men, is as completely an act of faith as any that the Middle Age can boast.

I can hear my good friend, the Professor of Biology, rather impatiently retorting that his science asks assent only to what it can demonstrate. 'Come with me to my laboratory, and I will give you the proofs. You shall look through my microscope and see both germ and phagocyte.' But how am I, quite untrained in his science, to weigh his arguments or interpret what his miscroscope may show? This, he may tell me, as he adjusts the focus, is the germ of typhoid or tuberculosis. So may a devout monk reverently de

clare that the splinter of wood which he treasures is a very fragment of the true cross. So did Boccaccio's preaching friar exhibit a vari-colored feather which, as he declared, had been dropped by the angel Gabriel on his visit of annunciation.

Were I to look through my friend's miscroscope, I should at most exchange my general faith in his assertions for a more particular faith in his demonstration. I am content to rest in my general faith in him as a man of clear vision and upright mind, a scientist already canonized by the acclaim of his fellow hierarchs in the biological mystery. What he tells me is indeed marvelous, but it sounds reasonable, and my faith assents. Doubtless were I to enter his laboratory, receive his discipline, keep his vigils with him, in the course of years I might share his vision, and my faith vanish into sight. In much this spirit, I fancy, the faithful of the Middle Ages received the words of saint and hermit and doctor. These men had, by holy life and works, by fasting and watching, by instancy of prayer, penetrated into the mystery and beheld it face to face. These men knew; the many were content to believe. For every man there was the opportunity to enter a monastery or inhabit a hermit's cell, to adopt the life and rule, and ultimately to share the vision. The alternative, then as now, was faith in the vision of others.

The modern monastery is the laboratory. Here, vowed to obedience and poverty, and often to celibacy, the brothers meditate and labor. If laborare est orare, why should not the oratory be called the laboratory? Has not each its altar and sacred vessels? As I look across the campus from my college rooms, at any hour of the night I can see the lights burning in some chapel window of the great Gothic structure

with the low square towers which the munificence of a pious donor has devoted to the study of life.

My friend, the Professor of Biology, was engaged not long ago in studying the problem of sex-determination in one of the lower forms of animal life. The nature of the investigation was such that particular stages in the process of gestation had to be observed at particular hours of the day and night. For a week he left his bed nightly at two o'clock and watched with an assistant acolyte before his laboratory altar; during the next week his vigil began at three; during the next at four; and so on about the horologe. Did ever mediæval monk observe his canonical hours with more devotion? Another of my friends was driven by ascetic zeal to withdraw last spring to a new monastery recently established on the drear, desolate, wind-swept rocks of the Dry Tortugas. The very name is a penance.

We have our shrines and holy relics also. In our museums are exposed to the gaze of the faithful the skulls and bones of great dinosaurs whose feet (if they had feet) trod this earth in I have forgotten which of the geologic æons. I have looked with proper awe upon the fossil bones preserved in the great shrine, visited of many pilgrims, on the western slope of Central Park. I have also looked upon the reliquary in the great cathedral of Cologne said to con

tain the bones of the Royal Magi, and in the near-by Ursula kirche I have seen the bones of the eleven thousand virgins who were the blessed Ursula's companions in her martyrdom. My faith in the authenticity of the dinosaur relics is, of course, complete; in Cologne I was, alas, skeptical, And yet, and yet! How much more worth while could I believe, as men once believed, in the Three Kings of Cologne! Them I should so gladly meet with in this world or the next. I should run away at top speed from a living dinosaur in either world.

It was once my fortune to be in Rouen on the feast day of St. Ouen, when the relics of the saint were exposed in his splendid church mid clouds of sweet incense and the chanting of Gregorians. I watched the vast throng of men and women and children as they pressed forward toward the altar to kiss the holy relics which the priests extended. I have never seen even a devoted scientist kiss the bones of a dinosaur.

Our modern world has not lost its faith, or even the blind faith we call superstition. Faith has merely changed its direction, and exercises itself on the temporal rather than the eternal, on the body rather than the soul. Perhaps there is some loss after all.

The Blériot monoplane, though it be lifted up never so high from the earth, cannot draw all men unto it.

I

IN all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly ef fort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear. Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring, have all combined to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned by the workers; getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests, laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young, a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not immediately productive of pleasure.

This work is seldom shared equally by all the members of the group. With bees, the drones and the queen alike are exempt from work, and an asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be individuals who are constitutionally lazy, and others who, because of strength or sex-attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of food and protection with less than their share of effort.

From the first, some division of work between male and female grows almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction. Following conception, the male can always run away

and leave the female to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly-born, he generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and for the most part she protects and provisions it.

Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of cows and hens, which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be true that, even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and oxen. The stallion, bull, or ram is too katabolic, too much of a consuming, distributing, destroying force, to be very valuable in the daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved; and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable, because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among domesticated animals, selection based on considerations of work multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.

As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the functions