conception under which the Christian world at large lay when Darwin announced his solution of the problem.  The religious world had been, up to that time, chained to the anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and it was even less due to the purely scientific faculty than to the philosophic that Darwin came as a liberator from a depressing superstition,—­the belief in the terrible Hebrew God, ingrained in the conscience of every reverently educated boy, and become in his growth inseparable from the maturer beliefs.  The evolution of the human mind itself had finally reached the point at which this anthropomorphism became a thing impossible to maintain reasonably any longer, and the magic word was spoken by Darwin which broke the spell and set us free—­who wished to be free—­from a mental servitude grown dangerously dear to our deepest faculties, those of reverence and devotion.  That evolution took hold slowly with some who finally adopted it was owing to the fact that, with them, that servitude had never been slavish, but always held less sway than pure reason.  And contemporaneously with this evolution of the human mind had come the liberation from religious persecution, either inquisitorial, legal, or social; and, perhaps for the first time in the history of the religious dogma, a man might openly dispute the fundamental ideas of a dominant religion and suffer no penalty for his skepticism.

CHAPTER XVII

SWITZERLAND

Though my “Bed of Ferns” was sent back from the Academy, one of my large studies was exhibited at the British Society, and the result of the year’s work was, on the whole, satisfactory.  Ruskin invited me to go to Switzerland with him for the summer, finding in some of my studies and drawings the possibility of getting from me some of the Alpine work he wanted done.  Unfortunately for both of us I could not draw well in traces, and he did not quite well know how to drive, and the summer ended in disappointment, and finally in disaster.  I was too undisciplined to work except when the mood suited, and our moods rarely agreed:  he wanted things which were to me of no interest, and I could not interest myself vicariously enough to do them to his satisfaction.  He preceded me some weeks, and it was arranged that I should come to meet him at Geneva early in June.  Certainly I owe to him my earliest and most delightful memories of the Alps and of Switzerland.  More princely hospitality than his no man ever received, or more kindly companionship; but, as might have been expected, we agreed neither in temperament nor in method, if indeed the mainly self-taught way in which I worked and thought could be called method.

He met me with a carriage at Culoz, to give and enjoy my first impressions of the distant Alps, and for the ten days we stopped at Geneva I stayed with him at the Hotel des Bergues.  We climbed the Saleve, and I saw what gave me more pleasure, I confess, than the distant view of Mont Blanc, which he expected me to be enthusiastic over,—­the soldanella and gentians.  The great accidents of nature,—­Niagara and the high Alps,—­though they awe me, have always left me cold; and all that summer I should have been more fruitfully employed in some nook of English scenery, where nature went undisturbed by catastrophes and cataclysms.