CHAP. XXIV. 



IN THE CREATION. 501 



led some way in tracing the connection of moral and phj'sical 

 evil in mankind with his place in that creation, and, es- 

 pecially, whether the law of continuity, which it has not 

 pleased his Maker to break with respect to his bodily struc- 

 ture, and which binds that, in the unity of one great type, to 

 the lower forms of animal life by the common conditions of 

 nourishment, reproduction, and self-defence, has not rendered 

 necessary both the physical appetites and the projiensities 

 which terminate in self; whether, again, the superior endow- 

 ments of his intellectual nature, his susceptibility of moral 

 emotion, and of those disinterested affections which, if not 

 exclusively, he far more intensely possesses than an inferior 

 being, — above all, the gifts of conscience and a capacity to 

 know God, might not be expected, even beforehand, by their 

 conflict with the animal passions, to produce some partial 

 inconsistencies, some anomalies at least, which he could not 

 himself explain in so compound a being. Every link in the 

 long chain of creation does not pass by easy transition into 

 the next. There are necessary chasms, and, as it were, leaps 

 from one creatui^e to another, which, though not exceptions 

 to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new 

 series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he 

 was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of 

 the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the 

 lightning his slave approaches to that of a speechless brute 

 who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on 

 the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what 

 wonder that he should partake of both ?"* 



The law of continuit}^ here spoken of, as not being violated 

 by occasional exceptions, or by leaps from one creature to an- 

 other, is not the law of variation and natural selection above 

 explained (Chap. XXI.), but that unity of plan supposed to 



* HaJlam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, &c., vol. iv. p. 162. 



