"Granted that we have lost all we had! Have we
lost faith? Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the
inner man who is rich before God? These are the wealth of
Christians!" The Civitas Dei, in its turn, became the sum of
attraction for the Western world, though it also showed the same
weakness in mechanics that had wrecked the Civitas Romae. St.
Augustine and his people perished at Hippo towards 430, leaving
society in appearance dull to new attraction.
Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of
experimenting on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb
all the free thought of the human race. The gods did their work;
history has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged
the mind; taught knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated
effort. So little is known about the mind -- whether social,
racial, sexual or heritable; whether material or spiritual;
whether animal, vegetable or mineral -- that history is inclined
to avoid it altogether; but nothing forbids one to admit, for
convenience, that it may assimilate food like the body, storing
new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The brain
has not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter.
Never has Nature offered it so violent a stimulant as when she
opened to it the possibility of sharing infinite power in eternal
life, and it might well need a thousand years of prolonged and
intense experiment to prove the value of the motive.
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