In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowledge of the evil of the world, of the baseness, pollution, cruelty, which have stained the earth from the earliest age till this hour, is truly a knowledge fraught with dread and woe. He who can walk over the carnage field of history and behold the agonies of the wounded and the fallen, the mutilations and hideous ruin of what was meant to be such beautiful humanity,—he who can see all this, ay, or but a corner of that awful Aceldama, and yet retain his unwavering faith in the final issue of the strife, and his satisfaction that it has been permitted to human free will, must be a man of far other strength than he who judges of the universe from the peaceful prosperity of his parish, and believes that the worst of ills is symbolized by the stones under which “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.” Almost every form of knowledge is some such trial of faith. Look at zoölogy and palæontology. What revelations of pain and death in each hideous artifice of jagged tooth, and ravening beak, and cruel claw! What mysterious laws of insect and fungus life developed within higher organisms, to whom their presence is torture! What savage scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast struggle for existence of every beast and bird, every fish and reptile! Turn to ethnology, and gather up the facts of life of all the barbarian tribes of Africa and Polynesia; of the countless myriads of their progenitors; and of those who dwelt in Europe and Asia in bygone æons of prehistoric time. Is not the story of these squalid, half-human, miserable creatures full of woe? Our fathers dreamed of a Paradise and of a primeval couple dwelling there in perfect peace and innocence. We have at last so eaten of the Tree of Knowledge that we have been driven out of even the ideal Eden; and instead thereof we behold the earliest parents of our race, dwarf and hirsute, shivering and famished, contending with mammoths in a desert world, and stung and goaded by want and pain along every step in the first advance from the bestiality of the baboon into the civilization of a man.