Believe me, a pontist can never solve even one problem in the law of battle if he lets himself be scared into a revolt against natural forces; scared by the incessant tragedy that each day’s little trip along the highways of history brings in a challenging manner before his mind’s eye. He must try to protect himself with humour and irony and scorn, as Thackeray tried to save himself from a feminine heart. The main point is that he should learn to live outside himself; then self-pity will not be his troublesome guide through the labyrinths of strife. Cardinal Newman asks us to believe that human life has been terrible--“a vision to dizzy and appal”--because mankind has been punished by God for some aboriginal sin too abominable for mercy and forgiveness. This doctrine is completely dark and horrible. If it were illumined on one side only, like the moon, it would invite the companionship of thought, but it gives no light whatever. Indeed, it implies that no civilization has been free to improve its own lot and to get progressive reason from the large brain of man. To blame God for our own follies--to say that our social acts are wild and foolish because we are being punished by Heaven for a sin of ignorance committed by man in the babyhood of the human race--what is this but a charge of illimitable cruelty against the Creator? Besides, we learn from the much nobler doctrine of evolution that human nature, despite all her wilful fondness for wrong actions, has crept up and up from a very low beginning, in an ascent continually wonderful, though infinitely slow and tragical. The accumulated progress excites in me as much awe as I should feel in the presence of a resurrection from the dead. Indeed, what is evolution but a vast drama of resurrections, by means of which base forms of life have become gradually better? Can anyone suppose that Milton, had he been a contemporary of Darwin, would have turned from the endless hopes that evolution ought to inspire, just to dally with fallen angels and with an errant couple in the Garden of Disobedience? And can we suppose that Newman would have written his famous page on the doctrine of original sin, had he not turned his back on modern thought and knowledge?