KIRTLEY F. MATHER 15 



then he should try to be true to himself, to express 

 more completely his own personality, to be as efficient 

 a man as possible. But if he wishes to hand on the 

 torch of evolutionary progress to a posterity better 

 than he, if he desires to participate In the upward as 

 well as the onward march of living beings, then he 

 must aim higher than that. What his aim should be, 

 it is the task of enlightened religion to discover. 



Evolution, as we understand it to-day, does not 

 guarantee success, progress or improvement to man 

 or any other creature. The fact that man has 

 ascended from a lowly origin does not indicate that 

 he must necessarily climb still higher. Instead, the 

 evolutionary processes guarantee to man an opportu- 

 nity which is in all likelihood the greatest opportunity 

 vouchsafed to any creature that has thus far lived 

 upon the earth. Co-equal to that opportunity is the 

 responsibility which to-day rests upon the shoulders of 

 mankind. That responsibility is no greater, in pro- 

 portion to the abilities of human beings, than was the 

 responsibility which rested upon the three-toed horse 

 or the agile trilobite, each in its own day, but because 

 of man's superior mental ability and broader con- 

 sciousness it is the greatest responsibility which has 

 ever been placed upon an offspring of Mother Earth. 



The experiment in which man is involved appears 

 to be that of developing a social order in which the 

 values of individual personalities and divergent crea- 

 tive abilities shall be conserved to the full. The at- 

 tempt to evolve a fine social order has been made sev- 

 eral times in the past by several different species of 

 animal, running the gamut from corals to insects, and 



