THE PATH OF EVOLUTION 



surgeon's knife, and relieved woman of the suffer- 

 ing that, according to the Hebrew myth, God put 

 upon her as a punishment. Death in itself is not an 

 evil, intruding needlessly into the world ; it is only 

 its premature and avoidable occurrence that is so. 

 It is the provision that renders possible the entrance 

 of each young, fresh life. In the course of Nature, 

 the young should live to grow old; but we know that 

 in this life, Death not only will come, but it must come. 

 The progress of humanity, the maintenance of the 

 highest type of the living, is dependent upon the 

 offspring slowly but surely improving beyond the 

 parent ; not in a few rare and individual instances 

 from time to time, but in the general advancement of 

 all. This cannot be, excepting by the race of man 

 being kept ever in full vigor by the displacement of 

 the old lives by those young, and, we trust, better 

 ones, born of us. 



We, who in the sunset of life look back from the 

 summit of old age to the beginning of the road 

 we traveled on in youth that road that seemed 

 so endless then, but that now seems so short we can 

 see that many of the obstacles we stumbled over, 

 have been stepping-stones in our path to a better life. 

 "We can see the errors we have made, and the physical 

 and moral dangers we were saved from, often by no 

 saving virtue of our own. Our failures even have 



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