Geology teaches among her first lessons the rise, growth, perfection and disappearance of various classes of vegetation. There is similar testimony respecting the primitive life of the warm seas and through the whole animal kingdom. At the present day certain types of birds, beasts and fishes are becoming slowly extinct. Time is a fine-comb, and the hand that grasps it is called progress. All ferocious and venomous animals, all poisonous insects and plants, everything that comes out of filth and shocks our civilisation, are destined—like these earlier classes and genera—to pass out of existence, and their extinction—to these as to those—will be the end of the world. The conclusion cannot be escaped that the human race is preordained to pass through the same experience. The theological or intuitive dream concerning an end of the world is therefore based upon fact and is not a mere figure of speech. It is the upshot of a principle as well as a conception of its open manifestation. Races and nations rise up; they reach the maximum of material prosperity and then slide down a rough declivity toward the sunset of their history. To such dying nations again it is the end of the world. The physical globe will follow this same law after its mission is accomplished, though now it is still in its youth, while humanity has but reached its thirteenth year in true civilisation.
Much will have happened when another hundred thousand years shall have passed away. The notes of music which come through spiritual communications, from lofty summits of inspiration, enable us to catch glimpses—however imperfect—of that good time when earth shall blossom as the rose. When men shall have grown spiritually larger and finer in body they will have fewer and fewer children. The early races propagated rapidly, and this is still the case in lower strata of society; but rising higher in the scale the married are less productive, and in thought ascending further and further up the mental range it is credible that a time may come when those who are fathers and mothers will see their offspring as angels, "neither marrying nor giving in marriage," having risen above the mission of propagation and become ready for that wondrous apotheosis which shall close the long pageant of human history. Thereafter our planet itself, by slow disintegration, will distribute its atoms to innumerable solar bodies ready to seize such chemical opportunities. So will it cease and its population will look down from the Summer Land upon the close of the sublime drama.
Once more, the cerebellum will one of these days cease to have any function with reference to reproduction. The finest, most poetic and spiritual mind gathers nearly all its propagating powers into the front brain and top faculties. Such persons have few children. Men who are yet full of the world's blood still believe that many children, better propagated, would be great blessings to the future. Only friends of progress dare to speak the whole truth on this subject. To our eyes the heavens are open, and our souls are filled with inspirations of the coming time, knowing that the better will dominate what is merely good, that the best will dominate the better, and that out of earth's dark places the white lilies of peace shall spring with an immortal beauty.