and gloom.  Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge.  The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue.  If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is.  It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.  That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma.  That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.  People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art.  But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes.  Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours.  They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization.  Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?  Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?  No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm.  We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal.  It is man that has broken out.  All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.  All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.  So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in some darkness and terror.  When I did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none.  Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic.  A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way.  In the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods.  History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time.  There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall.  Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity.  Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it.  I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.