+Science and the Fall.+--After this it is almost superfluous to point out that modern science knows nothing of it and can find no trace of such a cataclysm in human history. On the contrary, it asserts that there has been a gradual and unmistakable rise; the law of evolution governs human affairs just as it does every other part of the cosmic process. This statement is quite consistent with the admission that there have been periods of retrogression as well as of advance, and that the advance itself has not been steady and uniform from first to last; there have been long stretches of history during which humanity has seemed to mark time and then a sudden outburst of intellectual activity and moral achievement. It could hardly be maintained, for instance, that the Athens of Socrates was not superior to the France of Fulk the black of Anjou, or that the Assyria of Asshur-bani-pal was not quite as civilised as the Germany of the ninth century A.D. Alfred Russel Wallace has shown in his popular book, "The Wonderful Century," that the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a greater advance in man's power over nature than the fifteen hundred years preceding it. There are some people who maintain that while the material advance is unquestionable, the intellectual advance is on the whole more doubtful, and that, morally speaking, human nature is no different from what it ever was. But I do not think any serious historian would say this. Intellectually, the average man may still be inferior to Plato,--though even Plato did not understand the need for exact thought as modern philosophers do,--but civilisation as a whole has produced a higher level of intellectual attainment than had been reached by Plato's world. A civilisation in which four-fifths of the people were helots kept in ignorance in order that an aristocratic few might enjoy the benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while it is only too sadly true that modern civilisation contains plenty of callous selfishness, gross injustice, and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be denied that these relics of our brute ancestry are universally deplored, and that society recognises them to be inimical to its well-being and seeks to get rid of them. Thank God, as Anthony Trollope said, that bad as men are to-day they are not as men were in the days of the Caesars.