THE DIVINITY OF MAN. 3 



read concerning "the estate of the sons of men," that 

 u they themselves are beasts," has been simply ignored. 



Darwin's views were bitterly opposed, although it 

 would seem more dignified if God had fashioned the first 

 man (not directly from a clod of soil, but indirectly after 

 a long preparation of the material) through series of inter- 

 mediate stages of lower animals, from the infinitely more 

 refined organism of an anthropoid brute. Yet, even from 

 the standpoint of modern science we can still insist that 

 man, though his body consists of the same material as 

 the dust of the earth, holds an unique position among the 

 rest of creation. 



The sway of conservatism, however, is great, and so 

 the people trained in the old views of thought clung with 

 tenacity to a literal belief in the story of Genesis. In 

 spite of all that Darwin said in favor of the kinship of man 

 to the rest of animate creation, almost half a century 

 passed before the doctrine of evolution gained ground and 

 became universally recognized ; and there were no other 

 objections to it, than the implication as to man's descent 

 from lower forms of life and the denial of the legend that 

 God had formed him directly from the dust of the earth. 



At present there may be no one trained in modes of 

 scientific thinking who does not unhesitatingly accept the 

 doctrine of evolution with all that it implies ; but having 

 understood the physiological solution of the origin of man, 

 it may be wise to look at the argument of the reactionary 

 party, whose main contention consists in ridiculing the 

 idea that man was descended from the ape. 



When the writer of these lines was a child, he knew 

 a pleasant gray haired teacher of a country parish school, 

 who used to tell the story that when he once explained to 

 his children the first chapter of the Bible, one of the boys, 

 the son of a rich farmer, rose and said: "Mr. Teacher, 

 my father says we are descended from the ape." Our 

 sage old pedagogue cut off all further perplexities by say- 



