But man’s atmosphere is equally potent to blight and to shrivel.  Not time, but man, is the great destroyer.  History is full of the ruins of cities and empires.  “Innumerable Paradises have come and gone; Adams and Eves many,” happy one day, have been “miserable exiles” the next; and always because some satanic ambition or passion or person entering has cast baneful shadow o’er the scene.  Men talk of the scythe of time and the tooth of time.  But, said the art historian:  “Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm; we who smite like the scythe.  Fancy what treasures would be ours to-day if the delicate statues and temples of the Greeks, if the broad roads and massy walls of the Romans, if the noble architecture, castles and towns of the Middle Ages had not been ground to dust by blind rage of man.  It is man that is the consumer; he is moth and mildew and flame.”  All the galleries and temples and libraries and cities have been destroyed by his baneful presence.  Thrice armies have made an arsenal of the Acropolis; ground the precious marbles to powder, and mixed their dust with his ashes.  It was man’s ax and hammer that dashed down the carved work of cathedrals and turned the treasure cities into battle-fields, and opened galleries to the mold of sea winds.  Disobedience to law has made cities a heap and walled cities ruins.  Man is the pestilence that walketh in darkness.  Man is the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

When Mephistopheles appears in human form his presence falls upon homes like the black pall of the consuming plague, that robes cities for death.  The classic writer tells of an Indian princess sent as a present to Alexander the Great.  She was lovely as the dawn; yet what especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath; richer than a garden of Persian roses.  A sage physician discovered her terrible secret.  This lovely woman had been reared upon poisons from infancy until she herself was the deadliest poison known.  When a handful of sweet flowers was given to her, her bosom scorched and shriveled the petals; when the rich perfume of her breath went among a swarm of insects, a score fell dead about her.  A pet humming-bird entering her atmosphere, shuddered, hung for a moment in the air, then dropped in its final agony.  Her love was poison; her embrace death.  This tale has held a place in literature because it stands for men of evil all compact, whose presence has consumed integrities and exhaled iniquities.  Happily the forces that bless are always more numerous and more potent than those that blight.  Cast a bushel of chaff and one grain of wheat into the soil and nature will destroy all the chaff but cause the one grain of wheat to usher in rich harvests.