THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 
chase; without their special adaptation to environ- 
ment, he survives when they perish. A man is 
marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if 
he were a being of another sphere. He looks into 
their eyes and they into his, and no recognition 
passes; and yet we have to believe that he and they 
are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their 
stem forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in 
the abyss of biologic time. 
The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our 
powers of belief and our faith in the divinity that 
lurks underfoot far more than did the special crea- 
tion myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy 
when you have the omnipotent being to begin with, 
but creation through evolution is a kind of cosmic 
or biologic legerdemain that baffles and bewilders 
us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge 
and experience and all the flights of our philosophy 
that we stand speechless before it. It opens a gulf 
that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas 
from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up 
abysms of time in which our whole historic period 
would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle, 
delay, waste, failure that palls the imagination. It 
challenges our faith in the immanency and in the 
ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the 
creative energy down from its celestial abode and 
clothes it with the flesh and blood of animal life. 
It may chill and shock us; it shows us that we are 
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