EVOLUTION. 13 



The word of Christ that 1 1 the Kingdom of Heaven 

 suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force," does 

 not apply to the origin of Christianity alone but is gener- 

 ally true and will find its application whenever an im- 

 portant advance is made in the development of mankind. 

 It must have proved true also when the first intelligent 

 and intelligible sounds were uttered in the little circle of 

 a primitive ape-man family, when cries and shouts 

 changed to words, rendering possible an intercommuni- 

 cation of mind with mind, and begetting in them a purer, 

 a clearer, a more definite, and a truer conception of the 

 world. 



Life is like the tree that grows upward. Its roots 

 grow down into the depths of the earth. Its nourishment 

 is from below, but the power that quickens it and imparts 

 to it the strength to rise higher, is the energy furnished 

 by the sunbeams and comes from above. 



While it is true that man's body consists of matter 

 and is of the earth, his spirit is spiritual and reflects the 

 divinity of the world which represents itself to the natural- 

 ist as the cosmic order of law-ordained conditions. With- 

 out taking exception to the truths established by com- 

 parative zoology, which proves the kinship of man with 

 the lower animals and traces its bodily form back through 

 a series of brute ancestors, assuming the existence of the 

 intermediate type of the so-called pithecanthropes or ape- 

 man, we may rightly say that St. Paul's idea of man's 

 divine sonship holds good and will remain true forever. 



Having established the two sides of the ascent of man, 

 his rise from below and the help that comes to him from 

 above while he is learning the lessons of life, we shall bet- 

 ter appreciate the significance of the period of transition in 

 which man was just emerging from the brute state and 

 soaring with mighty impulse upward to the higher plane 

 of spiritual life and rational comprehension. No doubt 

 this primitive ape-man must still have been a ferocious 



