to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there were
no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of
it would be utter destruction.

Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The
mysterious thing we call life organizes itself into all living
shapes, bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel
in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular giants, capable,
these last, of enduring toil, willing to buy love and life, not
with suicidal curses and renunciations, but with patient manual
drudgery in the service of higher powers. And these higher powers
are called into existence by the same self-organization of life
still more wonderfully into rare persons who may by comparison be
called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose aims extend far
beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites and personal
affections, since they perceive that it is only by the
establishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral
faith that the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this
order to be set up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since
these thoughtless ones pursue only their narrower personal ends
and can by no means understand the aims of a god? Godhead, face
to face with Stupidity, must compromise. Unable to enforce on the
world the pure law of thought, it must resort to a mechanical law
of commandments to be enforced by brute punishments and the
destruction of the disobedient. And however carefully these laws
are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the framers at
the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed that
thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life;
and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought.
Yet if the high givers of that law themselves set the example of