386 THE STORY OP THE EARTH AND MAN. 



paradise of God, a link of connection of the spiritual 

 nature in man witli a higher Divine Spirit above ? 

 Life and immortality, it is true, were brought to light 

 by Jesus Christ, but they existed as beliefs more or 

 less obscure from the first, and formed the basis for 

 good and evil of the religions of the world. Around 

 this idea were gathered multitudes of collateral be- 

 liefs and religious observances ; feasts and festivals 

 for the dead ; worship of dead heroes and ances- 

 tors; priestly intercessions and sacrifices for the 

 dead; costly rites of sepulture. Yain and without 

 foundation many of these have no doubt been, but 

 they have formed a universal and costly testimony to 

 an instinct of immortality, dimly glimmering even in 

 the breast of the savage, and glowing with higher 

 brightness in the soul of the Christian, but separated 

 by an impassable gulf from anything derivable from 

 a brute ancestry. 



The theistic picture of primeval man is in har- 

 mony with the fact that men, as a whole, are, and 

 always have been, believers in God. The evolu- 

 tionist picture is not. If man had from the first 

 not merely a physical and intellectual nature, but a 

 spiritual nature as well, we can understand how he 

 came into relation with God, and how through all 

 his vagaries and corruptions he clings to this relation 

 in one form or another ; but evolution afibrds no link 

 of connection of this kind. It holds God to be un- 

 knowable even to the cultivated intellect of philosophy, 

 and perceives no use in ideas with relation to Him, 



