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the Mount and to the practical chapters of Paul, like the cwelfth of Romans. But Philosophy utters the truths implied. in the New Testament; truths, upon practical cbedience to which all the hopes of the human race are founded. She declares that the totality of the universe exists in a Personality, and that the universe exists for persons, for individuals. She declares that our sense of justice implies the existence of an All-seeing and Almighty avenger of the injured. She declares that the only just and legitimate end of all associa tions, corporations and states, is to defend the rights and ultimately advance the true interests of all persons and of each individual. Paul's epistle to the churches of Galatia is not only the great Magna Charta of religious liberty, but of civil liberty as well. By freeing Christianity from the bondage of Jewish forms, it enabled the spirit of that divine faith to go forth on its blessed mission of leading all Europe and America toward that high ideal which lies still far in the distance before us. A perfect democracy will be a state in which each individual secures his fullest liberty and his highest freedom by cheerful obedience to law, to laws which the majority of all the citizens shall honestly and earnestly believe to be just and wholesome. We can attain this by no sudden movement, by no radical changes; these would only throw us back toward the savage state; we can attain it only by carefully pressing forward in the lines of previous advances.

Thomas Hill

THE UNIVERSAL CONFLICT.

BY

C. E. SARGENT, A. M.

What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence

And justify the ways of God to men.-Milton.

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ERE it possible to retrace the narrow path of history across the desert of the past eternity, at every step would be found the landmarks of a universal conflict. The path would lead

us back across the crimson fields of Waterloo and Auster

litz and Marathon, through the silent banquet halls and amphitheatres where flit the

ghosts of mighty empires, out into the starlight of mythology, where all that is human in history melts away in the dissolving view of doubtful legendry, and the voice of man, in the hoarse guttural of cave and den, is lost amid the roar of beast and the scream of bird. Still backward this vast war trail of nature would lead us through the narrowing con

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ditions of life, past the forms of mighty beasts transfixed with tooth and tusk, whose outlines are chiseled in the eternal rocks, till the formula of the universal conflict would find expression in terms of elemental strife.

A principle so prominent in nature and so far reaching in its relations as that of conflict can not be regarded as accidental. When we follow it through the successive stages of natural development and note the various modifications which it successively takes on to meet the changing conditions of increasing complexity we are struck with the inseparable relation which it sustains to the law of evolution. It is found

to be the one force in nature that renders possible the law of progress. It furnishes, too, that principle of unity which all efforts at philosophic synthesis presuppose, and without which there can be no true philosophy nor broad generalization.

The relation which the law of conflict sustains to the great social problem that just now is forcing its demands for immediate solution with such mighty earnestness, throws much light upon it and will appear more clearly as we proceed. The conclusions to which the law leads will be more forcible and authoritative in consequence of a preliminary survey of the broad field of its operations in the physical world. Before attempting, therefore, to show the bearing of the law upon that which constitutes the prime purpose of this chapter, let us notice its modes of action and the specific relation which it sustains to development in each successive stage, from the lowest to the highest; from that stage in which physical science postulates the infinite diffusion and homogeneity of matter, to that which unfolds the lofty attributes of humanity.

The following statements may safely be made, which, if not quite axiomatic, will appear obvious when their true significance and bearing upon the subject are perceived.

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