1 68 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



Here therefore is the third great chasm, the 

 essential difference between man and the brute, 

 which no efforts of materialistic evolution can 

 ever bridge over. It is therefore satisfied with 

 meeting all these insuperable difficulties by mere 

 declamatory denunciations of "myths" and 

 "superstitions." Yet Christianity offers the only 

 sound and reasonable answer where materialistic 

 evolution fails most hopelessly. Its vain de- 

 nunciations are but an idle baying at the moon, 

 which moves on serenely in her course, as the 

 Church has done through all these centuries, 

 claiming the love and admiration of the world's 

 greatest minds. 



But if the human soul is certainly not de- 

 scended from the ape, can the same be said of 

 the human body? 



The first of the "Princeton Lectures," sent out 

 to all the alumni of the university to keep them in 

 touch with its intellectual life, was an essay on 

 human evolution by the professor of biology, Ed- 

 win Grant Conklin. The opening words of the 

 lecture are the professor's own statement of 

 Christian doctrine. "The doctrine of special 

 creation," he says, "taught that man was perfect 

 when he issued from the hands of the Creator, 

 but that his disobedience brought upon him im- 

 perfection, degeneracy and death." This, in his 

 superior wisdom, he forthwith sets himself to con-' 

 tradict systematically by the following mixture of 



