t — a he. 5) an er eet ee 
104 MAN. 
cause. Now the weakness of this theory, I have always 
felt, lies in its assumption that, while man’s mind needs a 
supernatural cause to account for it, his body may be left 
to the ordinary processes of development. The difficulty 
of such a view is obvious. I have stated the point in 
this way. ‘It is a corollary from the known laws of the 
connection of mind and body that every mind needs an 
organism fitted to it. If the mind of man is the pro- 
duct of a new cause, the brain, which is the instrument 
of that mind, must share in its peculiar origin. You 
cannot put a human mind into a Simian brain.’ In 
other words, if there is a sudden rise on the spiritual side, 
there must be a rise on the physical—the organic—side 
to correspond.” (“Virgin Birth of Christ,” p. 199.) 
Can anything be more cogent, more conclusive? 
The strongest direct proof against the “ascent of 
man,” however, has so far only been touched upon. I re- 
fer to the evidences derived from the history of Religion. 
To this I now invite the reader’s close attention. 
If man was developed from a lower order of crea- 
tures, or from any member of the animal kingdom, re- 
ligion must have been a late development. That this 
“tailless, catarrhine, anthropoid ape’ should have had 
anything resembling a religion, is, of course, not to be 
thought of. To imagine that he had a knowledge of 
the one, true God, his nature and his attributes, would 
be preposterous. ‘How then explain the origin and rise 
of religion? The evolutionists do not agree on this 
subject. Herbert Spencer maintains that Animism was 
the most primitive form of faith, Man _ reverenced 
spirits, the ghosts of the departed, then raised them to 
the eminence of divinities and finally developed the idea 
of one absolute being, God. Others suggest, that primi- 
tive man first adored the terrible powers and awful 
phenomena of nature, was thus led to Polytheism (a 
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