The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE EQUINOX All is not well, but all will be well one day. God begins His work, and He will finish it. Without progress, evil would be immutable like God. Progress explains ruins, and consoles the weeping of Jeremiah. Nations succeed each other like men; and nothing is stable, because everything is marching towards perfection. The great man who dies bequeathes to his country the fruit of his works; the great nation which becomes extin- guished upon earth transforms itself into a star to enlighten the obscurities of History. What it has written by its actions remains graven in the eternal book; it has added a page to the Bible of the human race. Do not say that civilization is bad; for it resembles the damp heat which ripens the harvest, it rapidly develops the principles of life and the principles of death, it kills and it vivifies. It is like the angel of the judgment who separates the wicked from the good. Civilization transforms men of good will into angels of light, and lowers the selfish man beneath the brute; it is the corruption of bodies and the emancipation of souls. The impious world of the giants raised to Heaven the soul of Enoch; above the Bacchanals of primitive Greece rises the harmonious spirit of Orpheus. Socrates and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, resume, in explaining them, all the aspirations and all the glories of the ancient world; the fables of Homer remain truer than history, and nothing remains to us of the grandeur of Rome 56