196 Natural Salvation. 



"Each and every one of the causes of old age and 

 death is of the nature of an ordinary physical cause, fairly 

 within human power to avoid or remedy, and many of 

 which in fact we are every day avoiding and remedying. 

 It is the sum total of these causes which has rendered 

 death a seemingly inevitable sequence to life. Yet not 

 one of them but can singly be warded off by human 

 science and foresight, and if one, why not all ? It is a 

 question of greater knowledge with us, not that we die 

 from any immutable law of nature as heretofore held and 

 taught. 



" At length, after centuries of dogma, erratic faith, and 

 equally erratic doubt, we are in possession of facts from 

 which a creed may be rationally forecast. Those facts 

 demonstrate the continuous evolution of life, under 

 nature, from lowliest forms ^to man: a long, weary, and 

 unaided struggle upward through organization, from the 

 elemental sentience of matter to the human intellect. 

 But is all this grand effort to terminate in the semi-brutal, 

 half-developed creature, man, with his ideas unrealized? 

 Has evolution ceased? On the contrary, it is our faith 

 that we have as yet seen but the nether limb of evolu- 

 tion. Its grand complement has still to be disclosed in 

 the perfecting of the human organism and the removal of 

 the causes of disease, old-agirig, and death ; in a word, the 

 achievement of immortality. Immortal life will be won 

 by applied knowledge. Man will save his own soul. 



