Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the song of the _Magnificat_. No such consummation of humanity has taken place, but it is undeniable that in the fifteenth century the Word entered like a seed into the soil of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began to fulfil itself. Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was the invention of gunpowder; another was the mariner's compass; a third was the invention of paper; a fourth, the printing-press; a fifth was the discovery that the earth goes round the sun once a year, and whirls on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of Christopher Columbus, whereby instead of over-populated India he opened up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Americas. These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting of iron: they enhanced incalculably the mastery of man over matter. But in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the beginning of human evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of control over others. But the initiative that now flowed to the multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of self-realization which the talking ape had enjoyed. It was the accumulated foresight and control of the universe outside of man which had been storing itself up more and more for ninety thousand years in the intellects and wills of the favored few. The floodgates were opened for the first time in the fifteenth century, and this godlike energy flowed in among the people at large, so that man, the many, the multitude, were quickened by it into hope on earth, unto life here and now, into liberty, creative originality, and the joy of self-realization.