But I may make another answer: 

Although it seems that many times have comets smitten the earth, covering it with débris, or causing its rocks to boil, and its waters to ascend into the heavens, yet, considering all life, as revealed in the fossils, from the first cells unto this day, nothing has perished that was worth preserving.

{p. 439}

So far as we can judge, after every cataclysm the world has risen to higher levels of creative development.

If I am right, despite these incalculable tons of matter piled on the earth, despite heat and cyclones and darkness and ice and floods, not even a tender tropical plant fit to adorn or sustain man’s life was blotted out; not an animal valuable for domestication was exterminated; and not even the great inventions which man had attained to, during the Tertiary Age, were lost.  Nothing died but that which stood in the pathway of man’s development,—­the monstrous animals, the Neanderthal races, the half-human creatures intermediate between man and the brute.  The great centers of human activity to-day in Europe and America are upon the Drift-deposits; the richest soils are compounded of the so-called glacial clays.  Doubtless, too, the human brain was forced during the Drift Age to higher reaches of development under the terrible ordeals of the hour.

Surely, then, we can afford to leave God’s planets in God’s hands.  Not a particle of dust is whirled in the funnel of the cyclone but God identifies it, and has marked its path.

If we fall again upon

     “Axe-ages, sword-ages,
     Wind-ages, murder-ages—­

if “sensual sins grow huge”; if “brother spoils brother” if Sodom and Gomorrah come again—­who can say that God may not bring out of the depths of space a rejuvenating comet?

Be assured of one thing—­this world tends now to a deification of matter.

Dives says:  “The earth is firm under my feet; I own my possessions down to the center of the earth and up to

{p. 440}

the heavens.  If fire sweeps away my houses, the insurance company reimburses me; if mobs destroy them, the government pays me; if civil war comes, I can convert them into bonds and move away until the storm is over; if sickness comes, I have the highest skill at my call to fight it back; if death comes, I am again insured, and my estate makes money by the transaction; and if there is another world than this, still am I insured:  I have taken out a policy in the ----- church, and pay my premiums semiannually to the minister.”

And Dives has an unexpressed belief that heaven is only a larger Wall Street, where the millionaires occupy the front benches, while those who never had a bank account on earth sing in the chorus.

Speak to Dives of lifting up the plane of all the underfed, under-paid, benighted millions of the earth—­his fellow-men—­to higher levels of comfort, and joy, and intelligence—­not tearing down any but building up all—­and Dives can not understand you.