To me it is always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive.  The scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are more gigantic than the pebbles.  He spoke some words—­words that seemed shameful and tremendous—­and the world, in terror, buried him under a wilderness of stones.  The place is the monument of an ancient fear.

If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones.  For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare.  Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety.  Profanity is now more than an affectation—­it is a convention.  The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry.  It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world.  If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—­the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt.  For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis.  There runs a strange law through the length of human history—­that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves.  The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself.  This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall.  It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden.  Most probably we are in Eden still.  It is only our eyes that have changed.

The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt.  He is not.  Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.  The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all