MAN IN NATURE 223 



his moral aberrations. These only come rationally 

 into the system of nature under the supposition of a 

 Higher Intelligence, from whom man emanates and 

 whose nature he shares. ^. 



But on this theistic view we are introduced to a 

 kind of unity and of evolution for a future age, which 

 is the great topic of revelation, and is not unknown 

 to science and philosophy, in connection with the law 

 of progress and development deducible from the 

 geological history, in which an ascending series of 

 lower animals culminates in man himself. Why 

 should there not be a new and higher plane of exist 

 ence to be attained to by humanity a new geological 

 period, so to speak, in which present anomalies shall 

 be corrected, and the grand unity of the universe and 

 its harmony with its Maker fully restored? This isr 

 what Paul anticipates when he tells us of a pneu- 

 matical or spiritual body to succeed to the present 

 natural or psychical one, or what Jesus Himself 

 tells us when He says that in the future state we shall, 

 be like to the angels. Angels are not known to us asj 

 objects of scientific observation, but such an order of 

 beings is quite conceivable, and this not as super-, 

 natural, but as part of the order of nature. They are 

 cratted beings like ourselves, subject to the laws of 

 the universe, yet free and intelligent and liable to 

 error, in bodily constitution freed from many of the 

 limitations imposed on us, mentally having higher 

 ran-e and grasp, and consequently masters of natural 



