THE KINSHIP OF LIFE. Sle 
s 
part of our common knowledge, have been declared con- 
trary to religion, and Christian men who knew these 
things to be true have suffered all manner of evil for 
their sake. We see the hand of the Almighty in Nature 
everywhere; but everywhere he works with law and 
order. We have found that even comets have orbits; 
that valleys were dug out by water, and hills worn down 
by ice; and all that we have ever known to be done on 
earth has been done in accordance with law. 
Darwin says: “To my mind it accords better with 
what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the 
Creator, that the production and ex- 
tinction of the past and present inhab- 
itants of the world should have been due to secondary 
causes, like those determining the birth and death of an 
individual. When I view all beings, not as special crea- 
tions, but as lineal descendants of some few beings who 
lived before the first bed of the Silurian was deposited, 
they seem to me to become ennobled. 
“There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its 
several powers having been originally breathed by the 
Creator into a few forms or into one, and that while 
this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed 
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms 
most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are 
being evolved.” 
With the growth of the race has steadily grown our 
conception of the omnipotence of God. Our ancestors 
. felt, as many races of men still feel, that 
The conception they were forsaken unless each house- 
aeons hold had a god of its own, for, numer- 
ous as the greater gods were, they were busy with 
priests and kings. The people could hardly believe 
that the God of their tribe could be the God of the 
Gentiles also. That he could dwell in temples not made 
Darwin’s words. 
