Nevertheless in all these respects some improvement has been made, along with the diminution of warfare, and by the time warfare has not merely ceased from the earth but has come to be the dimly remembered phantom of a remote past, the development of the sympathetic side of human nature will doubtless become prodigious.  The manifestation of selfish and hateful feelings will be more and more sternly repressed by public opinion, and such feelings will become weakened by disuse, while the sympathetic feelings will increase in strength as the sphere for their exercise is enlarged.  And thus at length we see what human progress means.  It means throwing off the brute-inheritance,—­gradually throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle needless.  Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it.  The ape and the tiger in human nature will become extinct.  Theology has had much to say about original sin.  This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation.  Fresh value is thus added to human life.  The modern prophet, employing the methods of science, may again proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  Work ye, therefore, early and late, to prepare its coming.

XV.

The Message of Christianity.

Now what is this message of the modern prophet but pure Christianity?—­not the mass of theological doctrine ingeniously piled up by Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement and Athanasius and Augustine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught with good tidings to men, from the very lips of Jesus and Paul!  When did St. Paul’s conception of the two men within him that warred against each other, the appetites of our brute nature and the God-given yearning for a higher life,—­when did this grand conception ever have so much significance as now?  When have we ever before held such a clew to the meaning of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount?  “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”  In the cruel strife of centuries has it not often seemed as if the earth were to be rather the prize of the hardest heart and the strongest fist?  To many men these words of Christ have been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too good for this world.  In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the working of Christ’s methods.  In the saintlike career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation which his example works in the character of the hardened outlaw Jean Valjean,