free-masonry of instinct like that which beggars illustrate when they silently display their deformities and mutilations as the most eloquent appeals. This gloomy mass is at once the instigator and the instrument of mortal destiny. Individuals may escape for a time, but they must eventually fall or lift the mass to meet them.

The most profound philosophers and most patient students know as little of this silent, gloomy human force as geographers know of the archipelagoes of the Antarctic. The philosopher begins with pure reason and expands it; the student delves into the records of other students; in unfathomable depths below both are the myriads who eat, drink, sleep and seek their prey as their primitive parents once did when they disputed carcasses with the beasts of the forests.

It is this gloomy, savage force that has made the contemplative soul of spiritual inquiry writhe under the startling contradictions of history. When this force has been aroused with fear it has snarled and roared defiance; when it has been enraged by opposition or the lash of mastership it has cooled its ferocity in the blood of countless wars, pillages and sacrifices; when satiated or pleased it has grunted with pleasure or relaxed itself in orgies so gross and unspeakable that modern history, with instinctive decency, has kept the story of them veiled behind dead languages. This gloomy, savage force has always been the same whether mastered or mastering. When some daring and cunning genius of its own nature has cowed it, as the Alexanders, Cæsars and Napoleons have done, it has marched out to slaughter and be slaughtered with a sullen pride in the daring that this mightier ferocity has put upon it. When it has mastered its Drusus, its Domitian, its Nero, its Vespasian and its Louis XVI, it has indulged in wanton excesses of rage and destruction until, spent with exhaustion, a new master has arisen to tie it up like a whipped dog. It was this gloomy and savage force that crowded into the greatest tribunal of all history, and yelled with discordant and frenzied rage into the very face of the noblest and gentlest incarnation of spiritual light that ever spent its brief moment on earth: "Crucify Him! Release unto us Barabbas, the Thief." It was this savage force, serving all masters with equal ferocious zeal, that Theodosius turned against the Serapion at Alexandria, in the name of Christianity, to blot out of existence the inestimable treasures of knowledge and literature that had been accumulated by centuries of labor.

At all times this gloomy force has been more wantonly cruel than wild beasts. Man has been epigrammatically described as a reasoning animal, a laughing animal, a constructive animal and even as "an animal that gets drunk;" but the truest description is that he is the cruel and rapacious animal. The greatest student of the jungle, who has written of the beasts of the forest with the intuition of genius, has given us this formula:

You may spend the remainder of your life attacking that formula of animal nature if you please, but you will find it at last still truth. Man kills not only the beasts, but his own species for pleasure, or in sheer wantonness of cruelty. He loves killing as an exercise; he loves it as a spectacle; he loves it as the origin of his greatest emotion. When that there is merely a brutish criminal to be hanged, human beings crowd the converging roads to the spectacle