SCHILLER'S picture of Stupidity challenging the gods, "Hurl here your thunderbolts and see if my dark belly cannot hold them," represents only one attitude of human dulness; it furnishes no suggestion of that other condition, when, penetrated at last by the thunder of heaven, she appropriates and proceeds to dispense it on her own account. And yet this is the fate she prepares for every great idea; it encounters first the imperturbable inertia of prejudice, only in the end to become the weapon of that prejudice against the very enlightenment in the cause of which it originally started. The Gospel of Christ after centuries of contempt and martyrdom at last became the idol of its persecutors, and in their hands served to extort the recantation of Galileo. The gospel of Mahomet, which was directed against the tendency of Christianity to revert to polytheism under the guise of the Trinity, eventually became a sword in the effort of Arabia to conquer Europe; and so the gospel of Evolution, which rightly understood rescues the destiny of man from his environment in order to restore it to himself, |