Vernet had to be reminded that the intellectual development of man had also shown itself in sudden starts and rushes toward perfection--now in one land, now in another; and never with an appearance of gradual progress, as might be expected from the nature of things. And therefore nothing in the spiritual advance which is declared by the sudden efflorescence of "altruism" dissociates it from the common theory of evolution. This he was forced to admit. "I know," he replied; "and as to intellectual development showing itself by starts and rushes, it is very obvious." But though he made the admission, I could see that he preferred belief in direct influence from above. And this was Vernet!--a most unexpected example of that Return to Religion which was not so manifest when we talked together as it is to-day. "You see, I am a soldier," he resumed, "and a soldier born and bred does not know how to get on very long without feeling the presence of a General, a Commander. That I find as I grow old; my youth would have been ashamed to acknowledge the sentiment. And for its own sake, I hope that Science is becoming an old gentleman too, and willing to see its youthful confidence in the destruction of religious belief quite upset. For upset it certainly will be, and very much by its own hands. Most of the new professors were sure that the religious idea was to perish at last in the light of scientific inquiry. None of them seemed to suspect what I remember to have read in a fantastic magazine article two or three years ago, that unbelief in the existence of a providential God, the dissolution of that belief, would not retard but probably draw on more quickly the greater and yet unfulfilled triumphs of Christ on earth. Are you surprised at that? Certainly it is not the general idea of what unbelief is capable of. 'And what,' says some one in the story, 'what are those greater triumphs?' To which the answer is: 'The extension of charity, the diffusion of brotherly love, greed suppressed, luxury shameful, service and self-sacrifice a common law'--something like what we see already between mother and child, it was said. Now what do you think of that as a consequence of settled unbelief? As for Belief, we must allow that _that_ has not done much to bring on the greater triumphs of Christianity." "And how is Unbelief to do this mighty work?" said I.