THE PATH OF EVOLUTION 



of our present lives were reproduced, but with forget- 

 fulness of the past, our identity would be gone ; it 

 would not be ourselves. We might repeat a life such 

 as we had lived before, without knowledge of it, and 

 without knowing those we had loved and lost. But 

 as our own actions mainly make our lives, the memory 

 thereof, if retained, could then make for us an actual 

 Heaven or a living Hell. In this life the brain 

 bears record in its imprints of our thoughts and voli- 

 tions. Conscious or unconscious cerebration will re- 

 produce in memory much of that which is long past 

 and gone. Our poor relations, the birds and beasts, 

 transmit to their offspring those imprints that lead to 

 acts which we call instincts ; they are inherited mem- 

 ories. A new life hereafter, reproducing in another 

 and a higher brain the duplicate records of an earlier 

 brain, would be a resurrection of the life that is gone. 

 Of course, no assertion is intended to be made ; the 

 conjecture only that it might be so, suggests that if 

 God so wills, a future life would be a miracle, no 

 greater than the life we live. 



The teaching of early Christianity, of St. Paul, 

 many of the patristic and other writers, was not the 

 survival of the soul after the death of the body, but 

 the resurrection of the body and the soul the giv- 

 ing of another life to the body and the reborn soul. 



The Gospel learned from the doctrine of Evolution 

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