It is the first decisive victory of Life over Death. In the truceless war between these two—living Spirit and dead Matter—we read the whole story of Creation. Many victories had been claimed for the spirit before the Resurrection of Christ, but none that was not indecisive and incomplete: half-victories, all of them, and after each the enemy succeeded in consolidating his advantage, through the very new types which Death created and in which Life seemed to triumph. What a triumph for life it seemed when, amidst the inert mass of inorganic matter, myriads of living things began to stir and swarm—the rudimentary forms of the vegetable and the animal world ! The spirit of life had made the dead elements its own, had used them as material for types of its own creating, had pressed the mechanical into the service of the organic process. What a wealth of types, countless yet continually multiplying! How subtle, how bold, how carefully adapted were its works, from the infinitesimal zoophytes to the gigantic flora and fauna of the tropics. But Death only laughed at all this splendour: Death is a realist, not to be hoodwinked by beautiful images and symbols, not to be deterred by premonitions and presentiments. Death knows that the beauty of nature is only a glittering pall, hiding a corpse that is for ever falling into decay.

What! (you say)—is not Nature immortal? No, that is a lie—often repeated, but a lie.