I70 MAN'S PRIMITIVE STATE 



fulfils no purpose. It reduces all things to vanity, 

 and this thought is the explicit basis of the pessimism 

 of the writer of Ecclesiastes. But progress in things 

 demands the presence of forces working for progress; 

 and when the progress requires a transcending of exist- 

 ing natures, these forces must also transcend. They 

 must be supernatural to the things which are made to 

 transcend their kind. 



The Christian view of history is in fuller accord with 

 these necessities of evolution and progress than any 

 other. It also enables us to do full justice to the 

 physical and mechanical aspects of the cosmos; and 

 to account for the gaps which appear in the conti- 

 nuity of things, when they are regarded from an exclu- 

 sively physical point of view. But it must be accepted 

 in its entirety, for its particulars hang together in one 

 coherent scheme. In this scheme physical evolution 

 can find a reasonable place, and by means of its 

 mysterious processes the human organism may be 

 thought to be created. 



But this new creature was designed for righteousness, 

 and he possessed moral instincts, and a dawning sense 

 of responsibility, of which his animal progenitors 

 knew nothing. Every previous order of life had been 

 able to fulfil the law of its being, and every ancestral 

 precedent suggests that man was also to be enabled 

 to do this. But if he had been left to the condition of 

 a merely moralized animal, he would have been un- 

 able to fulfil what had become the most important law 

 of his being. His inherited animal instincts were 



