THE DESCENT OF MAN 49 



LECTURE III 



(February 17, 1907) 

 THE DESCENT OF MAN 



THE question whence man has come and whither 

 he is going has always marked a point where 

 opinions diverge. Man is formed of dust and 

 returns to dust and this has always been main- 

 tained by materialists to be his whole destiny. 

 The idealism of every age of Christianity has, on 

 the contrary, asserted that this is not his whole 

 destiny. A ' spark of the divine spirit ' dwells 

 within the mortal body, and just as the origin of 

 man is to be sought in God's creative power, so God 

 is the ultimate end of his life, and the human spirit 

 can find perfect happiness nowhere save in the know- 

 ledge and love of God, in an everlasting life after 

 death. 



What has natural science to say on this subject ? 

 Man is undoubtedly formed of dust and returns 

 to dust, if we consider merely the lower or animal 

 side of a human being. Modern biology teaches 

 us that man, like other vertebrate animals, is 

 developed from a diminutive cell, and it shows us 

 further that in man, as in beasts, the germ cells are 



