According to this new theory the world, after having accomplished its four ages of constant degeneration, undergoes dissolution (_pralaya_), things having reached such a pitch of corruption as to be no longer capable of subsisting. Then there springs up a new universe, with a new humanity--doomed to the same cycle of necessary and fatal evolution, which the four _Yugas_ in turn go through, till a new dissolution takes place; and so on to infinity. Here we have, indeed, fatalism under the most cruelly inexorable form, and also the most destructive of all true morality. For there can be no responsibility where there is no freedom, nor is there in reality any good or evil where corruption is the effect of an irresistible law of evolution. How far more consolatory is the Biblical statement, hard though it first appear to human pride, and how incomparable the prospects it opens out to the mind! It admits that man, almost as soon as created, fell from his state of original purity and Edenic bliss. In virtue of the law of heredity everywhere imprinted on Nature, it was the fault committed by the first ancestors of humanity in the exercise of their moral freedom which condemned their descendants to punishment, and by bequeathing to them an original taint predisposed them to sin. But this predisposition to sin does not condemn man fatally to its committal; he may escape from it by the exercise of his free will; and in the same way he may by personal effort raise himself gradually out of the state of material decline and misery to which the fault of his ancestors has brought him down. The pagan conception of the four ages unrolls before us a picture of constant degeneration, whereas the whole order of Biblical history from its starting-point in the earliest chapters of Genesis affords the spectacle of the progressive rise of humanity from the period of its original fall. On one hand, its course is conceived of as a continual descent; on the other, as a continual ascent. The Old Testament, which we must here embrace in one general view, occupies itself but little indeed with this ever-ascending course as regards the development of material civilization, of which, however, it cursorily points out the principal stages with a good deal of exactness. It rather traces for us the picture of moral progress, and of the more and more definite development of religious truth, the apprehension of which goes on ever gaining in spirituality, purity, and breadth amongst the chosen people, by a series of steps marked by the calling of Abraham, the promulgation of the Mosaic Law, and, lastly, by the mission of the prophets, who in their turn announce the last and supreme progress. This is to result from the coming of the Messiah, and the consequences of this last providential fact will go on continually developing themselves, and tending towards a perfection, the term of which lies in the Infinite. This notion of a rise after the fall, the fruit of man's free effort