The present century has seen some powerful reactions towards older religious beliefs, but it has also been to an unusual extent fertile in the kind of changes that most deeply affect them. Not many years have passed since the whole drama of the world's history was believed to have been comprised in the framework of 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained.' Man appeared in the universe a faultless being in a faultless world, but he soon fell from his first estate, and his fall entailed world-wide consequences. It introduced into our globe sin, death, suffering, disease, imperfection and decay; all the mischievous and ferocious instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth. Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one introduced the disease, the other provided the remedy. It is idle to deny that the main outlines of this picture have been wholly changed. First came the discovery that the existence of our globe stretches far beyond the period once assigned to the Creation, and that for countless ages before the time when Adam was believed to have lost Paradise, death had been its most familiar fact and its inexorable law; that the animals who inhabited it preyed upon and devoured each other as at present, their claws and teeth being specially adapted for that purpose. Even their half-digested remains have been preserved in fossil. 'Death,' wrote a Pagan philosopher, in sharp contrast to the teaching of the Church, 'is a law and not a punishment,' and geology has fully justified his assertion. Then came decisive evidence showing that for many thousands of years before his supposed origin man had lived and died upon our globe--a being, as far as can be judged from the remains that have been preserved, not superior but greatly inferior to ourselves, whose almost only art was the manufacture of rude instruments for killing, who appears in structure and in life to have approximated closely to the lowest existing forms of savage life.