Why should the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution? To know the path by which God has advanced is not to disparage God. Could all this orderly nature have grown up out of chance, out of the accidental concatenation of atoms? As Bacon said: "I would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran than that this universal frame is _without a mind!_" Wonderful thought! A flash of light through the darkness. And what greater guarantee of the future can we have than evolution? If God has led life from the rudest beginnings, whose fossils are engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast geological volume, up to this intellectual, charitable, merciful, powerful world of to-day, who can doubt that the same hand will guide our posterity to even higher levels of development? {p. 407} If our thread of life has expanded from Cain to Christ, from the man who murders to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can doubt that the Cain-like in the race will gradually pass away and the Christ-like dominate the planet? Religion and science, nature and spirit, knowledge of God's works and reverence for God, are brethren, who should stand together with twined arms, singing perpetual praises to that vast atmosphere, ocean, universe of spirituality, out of which matter has been born, of which matter is but a condensation; that illimitable, incomprehensible, awe-full Something, before the conception of which men should go down upon the very knees of their hearts in adoration. {p. 408} CHAPTER V. BIELA'S COMET. HUMBOLDT Says: "It is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823."[1] There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds of human beings lost their lives, somewhat as they perished in the Age of Fire and Gravel, burned up and poisoned by its exhalations. And, although this catastrophe was upon an infinitely smaller scale than that of the old time, still it may throw some light upon the great cataclysm. At least it is a curious story, with some marvelous features: On the 27th day of February, 1826, (to begin as M. Dumas would commence one of his novels,) M. Biela, an Austrian officer, residing at Josephstadt, in Bohemia, discovered a comet in the constellation Aries, which, at that time, was seen as a small round speck of filmy cloud. Its course was watched during the following month by M. Gambart at Marseilles and by M. Clausen at Altona, and those observers assigned to it an elliptical orbit, with a period of _six years and three quarters_ for its revolution. M. Damoiseau subsequently calculated its path, and announced that on its next return the comet would cross [1. "Cosmos," Vol. i, p. 100.] {p. 409}