Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

THE AFTER-WORD. 459

So far as we can judge, after every cataclysm the world has risen to higher levels of creative development.

If I am right, despite these incalculable tons of matter

_ piled on the earth, despite heat and cyclones and darkness and ice and floods, not even a tender tropical plant fit to adorn or sustain man’s life was blotted out; not an animal valuable for domestication was exterminated ; and not even the great inventions which man had attained to, during the Tertiary Age, were lost. Nothing died but that which stood in the pathway of man’s development,—the monstrous animals, the Neanderthal races, the half-human creatures intermediate between man and the brute. The great centers of human activity to-day in Europe and America are upon the Drift-deposits; the richest soils are compounded of the so-called glacial clays. Doubtless, too, the human brain was forced during the Drift Age to higher reaches of development under the terrible ordeals of the hour.

Surely, then, we can afford to leave God’s planets in God’s hands. Not a particle of dust is whirled in the funnel of the eyclone but God identifies it, and has marked its path.

Tf we fall again upon

“ Axe-ages, sword-ages, Wind-ages, murder-ages ”—

if “sensual sins grow huge” ; if “brother spoils brother” ; if Sodom and Gomorrah come again—who can say that God may not bring out of the depths of space a rejuvenating comet ?

Be assured of one thing—this world tends now to a deification of matter.

Dives says: “The earth is firm under my feet ; I own my possessions down to the center of the earth and up to