494 MAN IN NATURE 



the circle of merely instinctive action, or by carrying him 

 forward until, by growth in wisdom and knowledge, he becomes 

 fitted to be the lord of creation. The first method has been 

 proved unsuccessful by the rebound of humanity against all 

 the attempts to curb and suppress its liberty. The second 

 has been the effort of all reformers and philanthropists since 

 the world began, and its imperfect success affords a strong 

 ground for clinging to the theistic view of nature, for soliciting 

 the intervention of a Power higher than man, and for hoping 

 for a final restitution of all things through the intervention of 

 that Power. Mere materialistic evolution must ever and 

 necessarily fail to account for the higher nature of man, and 

 also for 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 philo- 

 sophy, in connection with the law of progress and develop- 

 ment 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 existence 

 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 is what Paul anticipates when he 

 tells us of a " pneumatical " 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 as objects of 

 scientific observation, but such an order of beings is quite 

 conceivable, and this not as supernatural, but as part of the 

 order of nature. They are created beings like ourselves, 



