Erolution of Society. 205 



July orations of the past and the early part of the present 

 generation, with many of their implications, and also in 

 showing us that our institutions have a solid support in a 

 true science of society. 



Many prior attem])ts had been made, with more or less 

 of mingled failure and success, to reduce social chaos to 

 order and system. Significantly, the dominant civilization 

 of the modern world, and as we hope of the future, is based 

 on the teaching found in Avhat is claimed to be a sacred 

 book, which opens the history of the world as beginning in 

 a state of chaos, out of which the wonderful order and har- 

 mony of the celestial spheres were slowly developed under 

 the control of a Supreme Power. In the concluding divis- 

 ion of the same book, dealing with mankind born into a 

 world as the product of this Supreme Power, the highest 

 point is reached while dealing with fundamental social 

 })rinciples almost exclusively — religious worship being rel- 

 egated to the closet, and there dominated by social duty — in 

 the appeal of prayer to the same Power, containing the 

 words : " Our Father which art in heaven. Thy kingdom 

 come. Thy will be done in earth us in heaceny 



Evolutionary Sociology not only follows the first exam- 

 ple so set, by finding its fundamental principles in and 

 through a study of the prior celestial chaos and its methods 

 of reduction to cosmos, but it also follows at no great re- 

 move the remaining parts of that early account of creation 

 as it deals with the development of vegetal, animal and 

 human life on this globe — substituting only the slow-work- 

 ing principle of evolution for the quick-working assumption 

 of creation, and reducing all of it to an orderly, scientific 

 sj'Stem ; and it also folloAvs the later inspiration in applying 

 the evolutionary principles found at work in the heavens, 

 to the reduction of social chaos to beneficent order and 

 harmony, insisting always and everywhere on their univer- 

 sality and omnipotence, both in the kingdom of heaven and 

 in the kingdoms of the earth. 



So doing — and so doing throughout — it is impossible for 

 us to believe that the sacred book and the evolution philos- 

 ophy can be found in serious conflict ; and we are compelled 

 to believe that they will, when properly understood and in- 

 terpreted, be found in substantial harmony. 



In the heavens, order arises out of seeming disorder, 

 through the necessary development and developmental 



