V. THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 259

some extent it confuses or undermines the thoughts of nearly all men who have been interested in the material investigations of recent physical science, while retaining yet imagination and understanding enough to enter into the heart of the religious and creative ages.

66. And it necessarily takes possession of the spirit of such men chiefly at the times of personal sorrow, which teach even to the wisest, the hollowness of their best trust, and the vanity of their dearest visions; and when the epitaph of all human virtue, and sum of human peace, seem to be written in the lowly argument,-

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made of; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.”¹

The third, the only modest, and therefore the only rational, theory, is, that we are all and always, in these as in former ages, deceived by our own guilty passions, blinded by our own obstinate wills, and misled by the insolence and fantasy of our ungoverned thoughts; but that there is verily a Divinity in nature which has shaped the rough hewn² deeds of our weak human effort, and revealed itself in rays of broken, but of eternal light, to the souls which have desired to see the day of the Son of Man.³

By the more than miraculous fatality which has been hitherto permitted to rule the course of the kingdoms of this world, the men who are capable of accepting such faith, are rarely able to read the history of nations by its interpretation. They nearly all belong to some one of the passionately egoistic sects of Christianity; and are miserably perverted into the missionary service of their own schism; eager only, in the records of the past, to gather evidence to the advantage of their native persuasion, and to the disgrace of all opponent forms of similar heresy; or, that is

¹ [Tempest, iv. 1.]

² [Hamlet, v. 2.]

³ [Luke xvii. 22.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]