Ignatius Donnelly

“ They wander, breathing a foul and sickening atmosphere, under the shadow of an awful darkness, a darkness which knows no morning, no stars, no moon; a darkness palpable and visible, lighted only by electrical discharges from the abyss of clouds, with such roars of thunder as we, in this day of harmonious nature, can form no conception of. It is, indeed, "chaos and ancient night." All the forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling. ”

“ Oh, how humble is the lord of millions! How all the endowments of the world fall off from a man in his last extremity! He shivers, he trembles--yea, he prays! Through his bloodshot eyes he catches some glimpses of a God--of a merciful God who loves all his creatures. Even Frederika, though she has neither love nor respect for him, pities him, as the bloated mass lies shivering beside her. Can this be the same lordly gentleman, every hair of whose mustache bespoke empire and dominion, who a few days since plotted the abasement of mankind? ”

“ The scientist picks up a fragment of stone--the fool would fling it away with a laugh,--but the philosopher sees in it the genesis of a world; from it he can piece out the detailed history of ages; he finds in it, perchance, a fossil of the oldest organism, the first traces of that awful leap from matter to spirit, from dead earth to endless life; that marvel of marvels, that miracle of all miracles, by which dust and water and air live, breathe, think, reason, and cast their thoughts abroad through time and space and eternity. ”

“ We know the value of the precious boon of civilization. We know how bare and barren, and wretched and torpid, and utterly debased is soulless barbarism. I see enough to convince me that the ramifications of your society are like a net-work of wires, all over the earth, penetrating everywhere, and at every point touching the most deadly explosives of human passions and hates; and that it needs but the pressure of your finger upon the pedal to blow up the world. ”

“ William the Conqueror, Richard Coeur de Lion, Alfred the Great, Cromwell, and Victoria might survive only as the gods or demons of later races; but the memory of the cataclysm in which the centre of a universal empire instantaneously went down to death would never be forgotten; it would survive in fragments, more or less complete, in every land on earth; it would outlive the memory of a thousand lesser convulsions of nature; it would survive dynasties, nations, creeds, and languages; it would never be forgotten while man continued to inhabit the face of the globe. ”

“ How comes it that all the civilizations of the Old World radiate from the shores of the Mediterranean? The Mediterranean is a cul de sac, with Atlantis opposite its mouth. Every civilization on its shores possesses traditions that point to Atlantis. We hear of no civilization coming to the Mediterranean from Asia, Africa, or Europe—from north, south, or west; but north, south, east, and west we find civilization radiating from the Mediterranean to other lands. ”

“ What force is it that brings it up, green and beautiful, out of the black, dead earth? Who made it succulent and filled it full of the substances that will make flesh and blood and bone for millions of gentle, grazing animals? What a gap would it have been in nature if there had been no such growth, or if, being such, it had been poisonous or inedible? Whose persistent purpose is it--whose everlasting will--that year after year, and age after age, stirs the tender roots to life and growth, for the sustenance of uncounted generations of creatures? ”

“ The forests are gone; the fruit-trees are swept away; the beasts of the chase have perished; the domestic animals, gentle ministers to man, have disappeared; the cultivated fields are buried deep in drifts of mud and gravel; the people stagger in the darkness against each other; they fall into the chasms of the earth; within them are the two great oppressors of humanity, hunger and terror; hunger that knows not where to turn; fear that shrinks before the whirling blasts, the rolling thunder, the shocks of blinding lightning ”

“ If the Spirit of which the universe is but an expression—of whose frame the stars are the infinite molecules—can be supposed ever to interfere with the laws of matter and reach down into the doings of men, would it not be to save from the wreck and waste of time the most sublime fruit of the civilization of the drowned Atlantis—a belief in the one, only, just God, the father of all life, the imposer of all moral obligations? ”

“ To-morrow we will go out together, and I shall show you the fruits of our modern civilization. I shall take you, not upon the upper deck of society, where the flags are flying, the breeze blowing, and the music playing, but down into the dark and stuffy depths of the hold of the great vessel, where the sweating gnomes, in the glare of the furnace-heat, furnish the power which drives the mighty ship resplendent through the seas of time. We will visit the Under-World. ”

“ And if such a great civilized nation had dwelt for centuries in Asia, Europe, or Africa, why have not their monuments long ago been discovered and identified? Where is the race who are their natural successors, and who must have continued to live after them in that sheltered and happy land, where they knew no human and scarcely any animal enemies? Why would any people have altogether left such a home? Why, when their civilization had spread to the ends of the earth, did it cease to exist in the peaceful region where it originated?
Savage nations cannot usually count beyond five. ”

“ Here we have the light and darkness, the sun and the night, battling with each other; the sun fights with a younger brother, another luminary, the comet; the comet is broken up; it flies for life, the red blood (the red clay) streaming from it, and flint-stones appearing on the earth wherever the blood (the clay) falls. The victorious sun re-establishes himself in the east. And then the myth of the sun merges into the legends concerning a great people, who were the fathers of mankind who dwelt "in the east," on the borders of the great eastern ocean, the Atlantic. ”

“ The Greeks, too young to have shared in the religion of Atlantis, but preserving some memory of that great country and its history, proceeded to convert its kings into gods, and to depict Atlantis itself as the heaven of the human race. Thus we find a great solar or nature worship in the elder nations, while Greece has nothing but an incongruous jumble of gods and goddesses, who are born and eat and drink and make love and ravish and steal and die; and who are worshipped as immortal in presence of the very monuments that testify to their death. ”

“ Man, by an inherited instinct, regards the comet as a great terror and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous--something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death and ruin; but in any event man can not contemplate them without terror. ”

“ You drive out of the lofty temples of the soul the noble and pure aspirations, the great charities, the divine thoughts, which should float there forever on the pinions of angels; and you cover the floor of the temple with crawling creatures, toads, lizards, vipers--groveling instincts, base appetites, leprous sensualities, that befoul the walls of the house with their snail-like markings, and climb, and climb, until they look out of the very windows of the soul, with such repellent and brutish eyes, that real love withers and shrinks at the sight, and dies like a blasted flower. ”

“ And the thought forever presses on me, Can I do nothing to avert this catastrophe? Is there no hope? For mankind is in itself so noble, so beautiful, so full of all graces and capacities; with aspirations fitted to sing among the angels; with comprehension fitted to embrace the universe! Consider the exquisite, lithe-limbed figures of the first man and woman, as they stood forth against the red light of their first sunset--fresh from the hand of the Mighty One--His graceful, perfected, magnificent thoughts! ”

“ But the flame from the lightning-blasted monster flashed forth in the mountain hollows, hidden and rugged, when he was stricken, and much was the vast earth burnt and melted by the boundless vapor, like as pewter, heated by the art of youths, and by the well-bored melting-pit, or iron, which is the hardest of metals, subdued in the dells of the mountain by blazing fire, melts in the sacred earth, beneath the hands of Vulcan. ”

“ And yet, again, I felt that one grateful heart, that darted out the living line of its love and adoration from this dark and perturbed earth, up to the shining throne of the Great Intelligence, must be of more moment and esteem in the universe than millions of tons of mountains--yea, than a wilderness of stars. For matter is but the substance with which God works; while thought, love, conscience and consciousness are parts of God himself. ”

“ Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were gods. They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.
And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over Bifrost, it breaks to pieces." That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever. ”

“ Have pity on mankind; even as you hope that the Mind and Heart of the Universe will have pity on you. I have heard all. Do not plunge the earth into horrors that will shock the very stars in their courses. The world can be saved! It can be saved! You have power. Be pitiful. Let me speak for you. Let me go to the leaders of this insurrection and bring you together."
"He is mad," said one.
"No, no," I replied, "I am not mad. It is you that are mad. It is the wretched people who are mad--mad with suffering and misery, as you with pride and hardness of heart. You are all men. ”

“ That this catastrophe was indeed THE FALL OF MAN.
Think what a fall!
From comfort to misery; from plowed fields to the
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thistles and the stones; from sunny and glorious days in a stormless land to the awful trials of the Drift Age; the rains, the cold, the snow, the ice, the incessant tempests, the darkness, the poverty, the coats of hides, the cave-life, the cannibalism, the Stone Age.
Here was a fall indeed.
There is nothing in antiquity that has not a meaning. The very fables of the world's childhood should be sacred from our laughter. ”