THE LONG ROAD 
directing our attention to common near-at-hand 
facts for the key to remote and mysterious occur- 
rences. 
It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the 
wonder of life, because it takes it out of the realm of 
the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the se- 
quence of natural causation. That man should have 
been brought into existence by the fiat of an omni- 
potent power is less an occasion for wonder than 
that he should have worked his way up from the 
lower non-human forms. That the manward im- 
pulse should never have been lost in all the appalling 
vicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have 
pushed steadily on, through mollusk and fish and am- 
phibian and reptile, through swimming and creeping 
and climbing things, and that the forms that con- 
veyed it should have escaped the devouring mon- 
sters of the earth, sea, and air till it came to its full 
estate in a human being, is the wonder of wonders. 
In like manner, evolution raises immensely the 
value of the biological processes that are every- 
where operative about us, by showing us that these 
processes are the channels through which the crea- 
tive energy has worked, and is still working. Not in 
the far-off or in the exceptional does it seek the key 
to man’s origin, but in the sleepless activity of the 
creative force, which has been pushing onward and 
upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to 
full fruition in man. 
3 
