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seems to teach the doctrine that God had been preparing even the Greeks ; 
and the paper leads us to the supposition that all those persons who came 
forward from time to time to carry on this divine movement were inspired. 
The Apostle says, “I found an altar with this inscription-—‘To the un- 
known God.’” Why should there be an altar to an unknown God at Athens 
if the people had not souls, yearning and crying out for something better, 
something deeper, something sweeter than the Greek mythology afforded 
them? They did not know who it was they needed ; and the Apostle seems 
to play on this, for he tells them that He was the one he was going to 
introduce to them—the one they had been groping after—“ the Divine 
Comforter.” Then he says, “This ignorance God winked at,’ having 
brought His own Son into the world, and given all things into His hand, He 
would wink at their ignorance no longer, and therefore commanded “all men 
everywhere to repent.” There certainly does seem to have been a progress 
from the first until now; and this, I suppose, may be regarded as a prophecy 
of the still further progress of the human race. 
The Cuarrman.— With regard to the reference that has been made to the 
second page of the paper, I am sorry the author is not here to answer what 
has been said, because he could, undoubtedly, explain his own meaning 
best. I cannot help thinking that his meaning is given in the last 
sentence of the third paragraph, where, quoting Mr. Herbert Spencer, he 
says, ‘“ How do these ideas concerning the supernatural evolve out of ideas 
concerning the natural?” With regard to our mathematical conceptions, 
Helmholtz maintained most strongly that they are all absolute and actual 
experience, and he works it out, starting with what the mathematical con- 
ceptions of a being of two dimensions living on a sphere would be, and 
showing that a right line would not be the shortest and most direct as 
connecting two points, but that the arc of a great circle would be the 
shortest. I, for one, do not think we evolve mathematical truths out of 
our own minds at all, and the author certainly can hardly have meant 
that which has. been ascribed to him as the evolution of religion. I think 
the apprehension of an objective reality can hardly be spoken of as the 
evolution of ideas of the supernatural from ideas concerning the natural. 
It is, in fact, difficult to know what Mr. Herbert Spencer means by that 
sentence; and this, by the way, is not an uncommon difficulty in regard 
to what he says. The sentence would seem to suggest that super- 
natural ideas have not an objective reality. If they have, it becomes a 
question of observation and knowledge which can hardly be accurately 
called evolution ; it would rather be development. With regard to what 
has been said as to the progress of the Jews, I should be sorry if any one 
were to suppose I have overlooked the very steady degeneracy the Jews at 
times exhibited, showing, unfortunately, a stronger power in that direction 
than in an upward progress through the succession of the prophets. They 
certainly have shown deterioration to an extent that is perhaps all the more 
marked to us because of the height from which they fell. (Hear, hear.) 
