Its main importance consists in its revelation that, whatever we may think about the origin of man's soul, there can be no reasonable doubt that his bodily form, his bones and all his organs, have descended to him from ancestors belonging to the same common stock as the apes or monkeys. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century man had regarded himself as specially created in his present form. He had also supposed all other living things to have been similarly created as they are. From 1850 or so, onward, he had to realise that all the many and complicated forms of life, both of plants and animals, have developed--"evolved" was the word adopted for the process--from the very simplest forms, even from single tiny cells. It required countless ages for such a process; but the discoveries of geologists and astronomers--the earth-diggers and the star-gazers--combined to show that such countless ages not only might, but must, be assigned to the process. Our universe and our earth are by many millions of years older than men had thought. {194} But perhaps the chief fact of all, about this new discovery, is that it turned men's eyes forward, instead of backward. They began to look with a new hope towards the future of the race of men. Heretofore there had been an idea that the "Golden Age," when man was very good and very happy, lay somewhere in the remote past, and that present man had very much deteriorated. The new discovery showed him that he was, on the contrary, continually "evolving" into something higher, or, at the least, that, as he now is, he has evolved from something very much lower, even from the very lowest tiny atom that has any sort of life. It was an enlivening, hope-giving discovery. But let us not ascribe to it, as some, at its first coming, almost certainly did, more than its due. It revealed to man the origin of his body; perhaps, but of less certainty, it showed him the origin of his mind. That it tells him anything of the origin of his spiritual self is really only asserted by those who virtually deny that he has any spiritual side at all in his nature. Or so, let me say to avoid dogmatic assertion, it seems to me that they deny it. {195} CHAPTER XVI THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE When Napoleon had been finally chained down, under the ward of the British Government, on the rock of St. Helena, the Emperors of Russia and Austria and the King of Prussia made a compact, which was called the Holy Alliance, with the principal and excellent object of maintaining peace. It is not easy to estimate how far it succeeded in that good aim, because we cannot be sure how many wars were checked by the existence of the alliance. Probably we ought to give it credit for some negative results of this kind which do not make any show in the story.